World AIDS Day and a New Disease of Radical Gay Conscience by Sean Patrick Mulroy
“the complacency of the straight world during the first years of the epidemic”
a personal essay by Sean Patrick Mulroy
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HIV/AIDS has affected so many communities all over the world that even after its cure* there will still be countless things stolen from humanity by its ravages that can't be returned. America is not the world; it’s important to remember the disease is worldwide. The genocidal death tolls in Africa and the Caribbean** alone should be enough to remind us that this is not any one population's disease...and yet.
And yet.
Maybe the point of being human, of being limited in our compassion by widely disparate circumstance, is that we are given a specificity of perspective, however myopic our lens. When it comes to AIDS, I'll always see it through my lens, and when I do, it's the plague years, it's the ‘80s, it's Reagan, it's blood tests, condoms, RENT, and fear.
Have you ever needed something, really needed something, which you knew you couldn't have? When you find yourself starving for a food that doesn't exist, you learn to hate your hunger. For men like me, there was too often only emptiness where community was supposed to be. I assumed that what defined us was our loneliness, was the inability to trust that anyone was not laughing at me behind my back, was the way I thought, briefly, about death, whenever I made love. There was no real alternative to pain I could consider as a core identity. Nobody was there to tell me how to love myself; the straight people who raised me were just as unprepared for my being gay as I was. Ironically, I thought I did love myself; I thought what I hated was not myself, but gayness. I thought of my sexuality in a broad, impersonal sense; something that had been visited upon me, like an inoperable carcinoma that fed from my joy. I hated everything that reminded me of it; music, sex, bright colors, and especially other faggots.
This is where the devastation of AIDS begins for all gay men in America, regardless of their status. How is community constructed in the wake of being told repeatedly that out there, somewhere, is a man whose body will destroy you? How do you trust each other, after that? How can you take pleasure in something as fundamental to your human visibility as flirtation, when you've been taught that taking home a stranger is taking your life into your own hands?
I was almost thirty when I finally met a man who was able to care for me in a way that felt like rescue--for love to break through the almost physical cynicism that had held me hostage since I'd come out in my teens. He's dead now. We tend to do that. Faggots, I mean. We tend to die. It wasn't suicide, for him, although addiction looks like that sometimes. Like someone finding you in your bedroom. Like someone wondering what they could have done.
But still, knowing him awakened something in me. That awakening, along with the community I found for the first time in the Boston chapter of Delta Lambda Phi (a fraternity for gay, bisexual, and progressive men), gave me the strength of purpose to look more curiously into the history of my people, which necessarily lead to the history of AIDS.
I jokingly refer to this period in my life as, "the year that I spent getting stoned and watching AIDS documentaries all alone in the dark."*** It's funny now, to picture myself, popcorn and all, watching the history of gay death like a series of slasher films, but it was the first time I came to truly recognize the complacency of the straight world during the first years of the epidemic, and the vacuum surrounding my generation; a cosmic absence of light where artists, thinkers, and mentors should have been for me, for all of us.
It's deeper than another one-act play about some sad white boy who faints on stage and doesn't get back up. Before I was born, boys like me left the countryside and moved to big cities and walked into a culture, vast and self-determined. We had our own neighborhoods, our own modes of dress. Whole languages. We recognized each other on the street. When we didn’t get the justice we deserved, we rioted. We danced in clubs and drank in bars where people who were not of us felt unsafe. We enjoyed a cultural cache that is difficult to exaggerate or comprehend, now, especially in this era of erasure and assimilation, of white washing, and the washing of white hands. But it was there, once, that culture—glittering with power and welcome at the center of our cities like some kind of Vishnu disco queen—beckoning the farm boys to their deaths, then shuddering out of existence, all at once, like a tired fluorescent.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been embroiled in so many online skirmishes that I’ve started getting phone calls from concerned friends and family members about the state of my mental health. They’re not wrong to check in—when things aren’t going so well inside my own head, it tends to spray across my social media accounts. Winter comes each year and brings with it a predictable gloom that darkens me; in short, I get petty as hell. But between the Trump supporters on the right who have chosen to elevate a rapist and a racist whose Vice President wants to take money from the Ryan White Program to fund Conversion Therapy†, and the Castro apologists on the Left who would have us believe that any action or apology is enough to earn forgiveness for the forced labor camps where gay men worked in the sun until they died††, I find myself engaged in so many arguments in so many different directions that I’m not even sure who I’m talking to half the time.
When people dismiss the difficulties of the gay identity, or off-handedly discount the experiences of gay men as somehow being easy, or synonymous with whiteness; when people water down the meaning of my life with a philosophical queerness that vanishes as easily as it crowds out what cannot vanish; when people are willing to overlook the everyday dehumanizing hatred there is for gay men in order to take a convenient or self-gratifying view of the world, there is a wound at my core that widens and swallows the perishable hope inside of me. I wish I could explain it more logically. It's not as simple as another drawn out discussion of intersectionality, or another exercise in unpacking the mystification of heterosexual privilege—or rather, it's much simpler, but impossible to parse. It's seamless, and dwells in the primal depths of the heart.
At a time when I and many others like me feel most unsafe, I look around and realise that I am without a philosophical country. I imagine for a moment that ephemeral faggot heritage of the interrupted past, vanquished by something so invisible and incapable of malice as a disease, and I’m filled with an overwhelming sense of loss. I listen for its weak echo, a repeated distress signal from a long abandoned warship, run aground. When I find I am impatient, or exhausted, or feel like I don't belong, again; when I feel I'm being made to be ashamed for waking up, or being punished for being clumsy at hobbling through a culture everybody says is made for me, but that I swear to you is not mine—I reach out towards the thing that isn’t there. I try to point to it, and there is only a sterile expanse of wall where a painting used to hang. I want to go away and bring back something to prove to you where I come from, but where I come from is nowhere. Is gone. I know it's gone. I can’t explain why I keep expecting it to catch me.
I am trying so hard, every day, to not take it as a personal affront when someone tells me how complicated it is for their culture to not endorse my death. To not lash out when someone tells me that American culture does not endorse my death. To be forgiving, while not being confused. To keep my eyes fixed on the idea of radical faggotry as a politic of both accepting the self and accepting realities over political conveniences. To not reject the body I’ve been born to, ever again. To never be silent. To never close my hands, or be ashamed of their constant reaching, despite their stubborn emptiness.
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*The cure of HIV/AIDS isn’t going to happen tomorrow, but 2016 was a great year for research, check it out: here!
**For comprehensive statistics about the global state of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, go here.
***If you’re interested in torturing yourself with knowledge, I highly recommend the documentaries, Gay Sex in the ‘70s, and the seminal, “Paris is Burning.”
†For an enlightening (read: terrifying) history of Mike Pence and the RNC’s historical relationship with Conversion Therapy, check out this article from the NYT, here.
††For an admittedly polemic list of Castro’s crimes with a focus on the LGBT community, go here.
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Header image courtesy of Adam Martinakis. To view his Artist Feature, go here.
Sean Patrick Mulroy currently lives in the Mid-West where he is an MFA candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for Poetry. He can be reached via his website, here, or via social media, where he still won’t shut the hell up.