Sickness and Health

Whoo, wee – thank the deities for Lulu and the Titi de Paris without whom I would probably not have survived my last several very cranky days of gastritis. I haven’t been sick in the company of a pet since I was a child. Not only did Lulu-Cat often end up fulfilling the function of the hot-water bottle curled up on my belly, but she also seemed genuinely pleased to be in the company of another mobile being sprawled out immobile and napping. Titi de Paris ditched Arabic class on Tuesday at the bastard stomach-bug’s peak to bring me more ham, yoghurt, and coke, as well as to rest his weary bones in some kind of a preventative measure.

Speaking of preventative measures, it hasn’t helped my crankily sick state of mind to watch the New York Times put vicious and disease-ridden gay male sexuality under its voyeuristic microscope over the last several days.

The fame of the “new strand” of HIV that has shown up in the body of one man in New York has spread all the way to the French dailies, who tended to magnify that most sane people reacted by saying we should be careful about blowing the significance of this “new strand” out of proportion. I thought that the worst of it was when the New York Times picked a quote of the day from gay historian and journalist Charles Kaiser. On a day when the first of the international headlines was “Bush Seeks $81.9 Billion More, Mostly for Forces in Iraq ,” and when the second was about how the UN’s oil-for-food program is in trouble again because “New documents may show that the former head of an aid program made as much as $1.2 million personally from illegal oil shipments by Iraq,” the Times felt like it was more important to quote Kaiser saying “Gay men do not have the right to spread a debilitating and often fatal disease. A person who is H.I.V. positive has no more right to unprotected intercourse than he has the right to put a bullet through another person's head.”

Now, Kaiser might have chosen a certain number of other rights that gay men do not quite have: like the right to marry. Or he might have turned the question around, and made the rather more interesting though scarcely grammatical statement that “Gay men do not have the right to be contaminated by a debilitating and often fatal disease.” Which might put some of the burden on the shoulders of the Bush administration’s friends who have been persistently pushing abstinence-only sexual education and made anyone doing intelligent HIV prevention education nervous since the beginning of the dark ages they are leading us into at en ever quicker pace. It might also have been nice if Queenie Kaiser had included himself a bit more explicitly in the quote of the day. In fact it might have made all the difference in the world to say “We do not have the right to spread a debilitating and often fatal disease.” The “we” would end up ambiguous: it could also refer to reporters for the New York Times, who, by naming the phenomenon in the way that they do, contribute to the diffusion of the practice. It might refer to a Bush administration that funds AIDS programs in Africa that teach abstinence-only to people to whom this is nonsensical. And most importantly it might bring Kaiser and the rest of us to keep asking the complicated questions that surround sexual practice.

It looks like the worst of it, though, may actually be today: the Times has concluded their series of “reporting” on the “deadly new” virus, and it’s time to draw the moral of the story. The first moral is, actually, one of practice: “young people are returning to dangerous sexual behavior,” says the end of the first paragraph. Well, that can’t exactly be true if a young person has never had or is still in the midst of establishing safer sexual practice and if he’s living under a government for whom precaution (diplomatic, governmental, rhetorical, fuck, basically any –al thing) has no meaning whatsoever. And then there’s “the apparently widespread risky behavior this case has brought to light.” Um, I’ve been having conversations about this “risky behavior” with friends for at least 2 years now. The documentary “The Gift”—which I have yet to see—made the festival rounds and was praised by the NY Times itself last summer. Also last summer, the delightful Judith Halberstam was already cattily tired of the gay boys’ fretting over the subject at a talk I heard her give. And I’m tired of it, too: not knowing, when going out for public sex, whether I’ll have a fine time because I’ll end up with someone or several ones who care enough for the world I’m a part of to put and keep a condom on – periodic checking keeps me abreast, and there is the 24 hours post-exposure treatment should something happen – or whether I’ll be surrounded by people who all are or seem to be fucking without a condom. Several things can happen if I find myself at that point: On a good night, I can end up thinking, fucking lunatics, who do they think they are! Or maybe even, Jesus, are they and the world we’re in really that bad off? On a bad night, I end up thinking, well, what is there to lose at this point, why not run the risk? (So far, I’ve been able to hear myself thinking this enough not to take the risk).

It seems to me that, at this point in the differently articulated but ever present AIDS crisis, it is perhaps most important to find a way of recognizing and magnifying that last reaction that I, a reasonably happy and occasionally depressed gay man who is not necessarily exemplary but probably somewhat symptomatic, have in public sex situations. Fucking without a condom can be a terribly seductive idea.

Given this fact, these practices, and the fantasies that feed them, it seems the goal of whatever activist responses are formulated should be the following: help people care for themselves, with the idea that this will help them care for others. This may take some aggressive shock tactics like the one the NY Times describes as being under consideration by some AIDS activists: “showing up at places where impromptu sex parties happen and confronting the participants” may get several difficult conversations underway on the ground. It is certainly not going to happen if these invasions of public or semi-public sex spaces are conceived of as taking away men’s rights to certain kinds of sex. And it’s certainly not going to help if we track “the contaminators down,” hopefully cited as the activists’ guiding idea only through a NYTimes exaggeration. Enough of us also need to make sure that NYTimes readers know that it is not because “open sex parties” were “all but stamped out” in the 90’s, but because people played according to rules of engagement that were announced and respected at what sex parties there were. (see Douglas Crimp, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic” in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism and we can talk about what has changed since then).  Perhaps part of the problem is that when institutional power is as obviously corrupt as it is these days, the expression "empowerment" ends up meaning an awfully double-edged thing.

I don’t know if I’m scratching the surface here. The best tactic is perhaps just to tell some stories. Which is what a blog is for, after all. So coming soon to this particular queer corner of the Web World: sexy and not so sexy sex stories, from backrooms in Paris you only dream about!!

Comments

[spinster]

Wilma, I have been wanting to comment on this entry for a long time. Now it is late and I am quite tired but a few quick things:
1) I have gastritis too so you have my full sympathies. I know of the terrible pain. And, perhaps I shouldn't say this, but since quitting the cigarettes my stomach has dramatically improved (it was one of the reasons I became a traitor). *Knock on wood* I used to get minor episodes once a month and a big one several times a year.
2) I liked hearing your thoughts about public sex and look forward to more entries from the backroom of Paris!

[principessa]

Aw, shucks, thanks, Spinster. I've just now posted "Sex spots 1," the 1 indicating that there's more to come. And thanks for your gastritic sympathies. I actually wasn't in too much pain. I just couldn't eat anything. And I'm glad to hear that quitting smoking has helped your tummy. And you should know that the fact that you of all people decided to quit is an inspiration to us smoking but ageing principessas the world over. And (I promise this is the last bit of the ands) don't let your traitor sympathies make you feel like you can start smoking again...