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.
“It seems to me I know more about fear than I do pain,” I wrote in 1990, “and I don’t want to add Alan and Byron’s pain to my fear.” This statement strikes me as just as true in 2013 as it did twenty-three years ago, but what it’s taken me all this time to realize is that much of “their” fear was a projection of my own. It was Byron who taught me to yell “ACT UP! Fight back! Fried eggs!” (instead of “ACT UP! Fight back! Fight AIDS!”) to relieve the monotony of two- or three-hour chants at demos: you could shout it right in cops’ faces, in reporters’; they never heard the difference. His biggest gripe: that he and Alan didn’t learn their status sooner. He could’ve died, Byron told me in the hospital, he could’ve been monitoring his T cells, he could’ve been prophylaxing months ago, he could’ve died. The emphasis in his words was on tense, not meaning, as if the threat of death had been removed by mere knowledge that it existed (I would make the same rationalizations a year later, when I dated an HIV-positive man for the first time). But they weren’t deluded—not anymore. I could drop dead tomorrow, Alan told me from his hospital bed, pentamidine dripping into his arm, but I feel myself getting better and I just can’t think every second that I’m dying, I’d go crazy. I remember hoping it would be that simple: that Alan and Byron would only think of their deaths when one of them got sick, and that I, too, would only think of their deaths when one of them got sick. I remember trying to create an elaborate metaphor to explain the difference between my knowledge and theirs—something to the effect that death, embodied in the hospital, was a land I only visited, clutching my green plastic visitor’s card like a passport, but that they inhabited. But the truth was simpler: there were times when I woke sweating from the AIDS nightmare we all had in 1990 and knew it had only been a dream, and there were nights when they woke sweating and didn’t know—they just didn’t know.
I remember this one time … Fuck. That’s how you talk about dead people, isn’t it, after the emotions have dulled and the specifics faded. After twenty-three years have gone by. “I remember this one time,” you say, knowing that at the time it hadn’t been an “experience” or a memory, let alone a symbol. It had been life. Yours. Theirs. You store away the mnemonic thinking it will help you remember, and indeed it does: but the first thing it brings to mind is always itself, and as more and more time goes by you have to work harder and harder to get to the truth that lies beyond the signpost. But even so. I remember this one time. Spring 1990. Byron and I were bicycling down Twenty-second Street between Eleventh and Tenth avenues, which was then a block of derelict warehouses and garages, many shrouded in scaffolding that had itself fallen into disrepair; Alan was home from the hospital, sleeping. Two fast revolutions and we coasted, standing on the pedals, for fifty feet. Sweat dripped down my back, but not from exertion. Some unknown zoning consideration had decreed that traffic should run west to east on this single block, rather than east to west as it did on other even-numbered streets, which meant that cars couldn’t continue on from the block of 22nd between Ninth and Tenth, leaving the block between Tenth and Eleventh virtually devoid of vehicular traffic, and, at night, of pedestrians as well. Gay men had taken advantage of this desolation to transform the block into a cruising strip. Men lined the sidewalks, alone, in pairs, larger groups. Where sex was happening, it was usually just hand-jobs, circle jerks. A couple of men knelt before their partners. One man, still sitting on his bicycle, stared us down as we passed, seemingly ignorant of the man who stroked his penis. When Byron and I reached Tenth Avenue, we kissed good-bye, waited for the light to change. He surprised me then: “The worst thing about being positive,” he said, “is that in the last eight years I’ve only had unsafe sex three times.” This floored me. There was, on the one hand, the idea that it only took three slips to catch him; there was, on the other, the idea that for the previous eight years Byron had known that a single unprotected encounter could leave him infected. I shook my head in silence, we parted. Having tested negative since I’d moved to New York, I never connected his actions to my own unsafe encounter.
But Byron pulled me aside a few days later. “I went back after you left, Dale,” he told me. “I told myself I was just going for a look, but there was this big ol’ Daddy and I couldn’t help myself. He wanted me to go home with him but I wanted it right there on the street.” “What did you do?” “I gave him the ultimate safe-sex blowjob.” “What’s that?” “I made him keep his pants on.” “Did he come?” “Did he come!” “How?” And as he described it to me, a sly smile creeping across his face, told me how he’d licked the man’s pants until they were sopping, I felt a barrier between us similar to the cotton covering that Daddy’s crotch, because I realized that not only was Byron’s tragedy not my tragedy, but neither was it my triumph. I was only listening in, looking on, empathizing perhaps, but not really understanding. And though I’ve never forgotten what he told me, as the years go by I find myself wondering more and more if the words I remember are still his, or if, by now, they belong only to me.