The Glade 4.0

I've seen and read and written a lot about the AIDS plague in America, fifteen years of mass sickness and death that killed five times as many young Americans as the Vietnam War in roughly the same period of time. I was a volunteer "buddy" to a man dying from AIDS before I tested HIV-positive myself. I lost my dearest friend, who found out he had AIDS at the very moment I found out I was HIV-positive, and countless others as well. I was scared shitless for years. I remember one night talking on the phone to an old boyfriend who was in the same mess as I was: "One thing we need to remember, if we survive this," I said. "We must never forget how **** terrified we are."

I channeled that fear into my books, Virtually Normal and Love Undetectable. I wrote the first because I didn't expect to live to write the second. The date on the preface is the day I was diagnosed. I wrote the bleakest essay of my life in 1990 for TNR: "Gay Life, Gay Death." I went to ACT-UP meetings in New York City to absorb the scene and to Harlem's projects to see a dying gay man whose main worry was that a white guy like me on his doorstep would out him in front of his entire community. I watched young, vibrant men in their twenties turn into skeletons in a matter of weeks. I wandered through the great horizontal cathedral of the AIDS quilt on Washington's Mall, and saw a wave of grief that reduced the entire scene to an eerie silence.

People forget that HIV decimated the immune system - but people actually died from the opportunistic infections. These "OI"s were something out of Dante's Hell. So many drowned to death from pneumocystis. Or they would develop hideous KS lesions, or extremely painful neuropathy (my "buddy" screamed once when I brushed a bedsheet against the tip of his toes), or CMV where a friend of mine had to inject himself in the eyeball to prevent going blind, or toxoplasmosis, a brain degenerative disease where people wake up one day to find they can't tie their shoe-laces, and their memories are falling apart. Within the gay community, 300,000 deaths amounted to a plague of medieval dimensions. Once you knew your T-cells were below a certain level, it was like being in a dark forest where, at any moment, some hideous viral or bacterial creature could emerge and kill you. And for fifteen years there was nothing to take that worked, just the agonizing helplessness of waiting to die, and watching others get assaulted by one terrifying disease after another.

In this immense catastrophe, you had an almost epic tale: no sooner had a critical mass of gay men actually come out, established themselves in urban ghettoes, and finally celebrated their humanity and sexuality than they were struck down in droves. But the next part of the story is the most amazing. We could so easily have given up in shame or self-hatred or exhaustion. But somehow, we found the internal resources to fight back. We knew that the federal government would refuse to react as they would have had this disease occurred anywhere but among homosexuals. And so we were almost a model of self-help, activism and empowerment. We had nothing to lose any more - and that unleashed a kind of gay power that is the most powerful reason, in my view, for why we have made so much progress so quickly since.

..."How To Survive A Plague" is the first documentary that I have seen that does justice to this story of a civil rights movement rising from the ashes of our dead....If you want to understand the gay civil rights movement in the last twenty years, you need to see this film. None of it would have happened as it did, if we had not been radicalized by mass death, stripped of fear by imminent death, and determined to bring meaning to the corpses of our loved ones by fighting for the basic rights every heterosexual has taken for granted since birth. No spouse was ever going to be turned away from his husband's deathbed again, as far as I was concerned. Never. Again. For me, marriage equality is not an abstract concept. It has always been my attempt to make my friends' deaths mean something more than tragedy. And it is non-negotiable.

19 Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. 20 There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.

fifteen years of mass sickness and death that killed five times as many young Americans as the Vietnam War in roughly the same period of time.

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin

That sounds off to me. Almost 300,000 people died of AIDS in 10ish years?

One of the problems I have with this:

"We knew that the federal government would refuse to react as they would have had this disease occurred anywhere but among homosexuals."

Is that anything the federal government would/could have done would have been accompanied by a wide scale quarentine at worst, and at best an edict not to engage in incredibly risky behavior (ie. don't let some dude plug you in the ***, and don't use IV drugs), both of which would have been considered, and rightly so, discrimination.

I think the reaction they were looking for was government-funded research and treatment.

19 Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. 20 There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.

I think that's incredibly optimistic, especially examining an incredibly fatal and persistant communicable disease affecting an identifiable sub-segment of the population. Had the government become involved, Andrew Sullivan would have been living in a FEMA camp.

And I think such a response would have been more aggressive and more likely if it *hadn't* been affecting an identifiable sub-segment of the population...

19 Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. 20 There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.

Imagine if AIDS could spread from eating cheesburgers or tacos....

19 Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. 20 There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.

But...isn't an HIV infection almost 100% preventable by not engaging in risky sex and drug behavior?

19 Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. 20 There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.

Outside of direct fluid exposure, resulting from poor medical practice or error, generally yes. Although it can be passed from an irresponsible person to an unwitting responsible person if they are decieved about their partner's life style.

19 Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. 20 There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.

Problem: What constitutes "risky behavior"?

This is a vague term, which is generally used by someone trying to sell you something or push an agenda. When you hear "risky behavior" you start to think drug addicts having random anonymous sex. From there, it's easy to sell church-goers that AIDS is the wrath of God striking down the sinners.

Many years ago, I knew a young woman who had herpes. She had engaged in sex precisely one time. It just so happened that her partner was infected, and passed it along to her. The incident happened before I met her, so I don't know if he knew about it and lied, or was unaware himself. Hell, maybe she was lying to me. Maybe she was a rampaging slut who **** half of St. Louis. I only have her word to go on, after all. Anyway, she may have been naive and foolish, but was it risky behavior? Do any of us even have a right to judge that? She had unprotected sex with someone she trusted, and she's not the only woman that's ever done such a thing. Are there any women out there who have children through men they are no longer married to, or even men they never married in the first place?

I know a different woman who cheated on her husband and contracted herpes. While society frowns upon marital infidelity, and this woman would be considered a lying, cheating whore, her actions were a far cry from random anonymous sex. People who cheat on their spouse typically do it with one person, not with several. Her actions were disloyal and sleazy, but was it risky behavior? What about her husband, who she passed her infection along to? Was he engaged in risky behavior when he had unprotected sex with his wife?

What does risky sex actually mean?

I told two stories about herpes, not AIDS. Does that make a difference? Why? Why not?

19 Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. 20 There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.

19 Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. 20 There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.