|
|
 
|
     
DECEMBER 30, 1996/JANUARY 6, 1997 VOL. 148 NO. 29
Here's what I find most shocking about AIDS: it has become comprehensible. Friends have been dead for 15 years. Worthy organizations like the American Foundation for AIDS Research and Gay Men's Health Crisis (G.M.H.C.) own buildings with serenity gardens, and the red ribbon symbolizing AIDS awareness appears on mugs, Christmas-tree ornaments and beach towels while remaining a fashion challenge for Oscar-night actresses in strapless gowns. Elizabeth Taylor and Sharon Stone impressively share the fund-raising crown; Sharon was barely a B-movie starlet when the epidemic began. AIDS awareness has become ubiquitous, and the possible new breakthrough in protease cocktails has somehow become a component of the AIDS industry--perhaps a miracle or maybe just another item on the boardroom agenda. This matter-of-factness was inevitable: the sheer passage of time dilutes horror. The earliest AIDS deaths were accompanied by roaring panic. My friend Eric, a stage manager and haberdashery salesclerk, died in '86. His extreme weight loss and hollow-cheeked pallor gave him a look of near theatrical decay, and his paranoia and memory loss were not then recognized as symptoms of dementia. He was surprisingly granted a luxurious room in a Manhattan hospital, with a uniformed guard at the door; we later discovered that the staff was being extra cautious because another AIDS patient had jumped from the roof a day earlier. All visitors were required to wear surgical masks, but almost no one did; we didn't want Eric's last moments to be accompanied by a circle of fearful Michael Jacksons. During those first years, AIDS was unspeakable. Media coverage was nonexistent, and denial ruled. The founding members of G.M.H.C. tried to hand out flyers regarding the new disease on the dock at Fire Island, and no one would take them. Rumors abounded--that the virus was spread through poppers, that it was deliberate government genocide, that it was carried in swine flu; I remember thinking that the ultimate gay plague would be contracted over the phone. Soon, however, compassion and terror galvanized the gay community. Anxious mobs attended Larry Kramer's landmark AIDS drama, The Normal Heart, in which medical statistics were painted on the walls of the set and constantly updated. Theater suddenly performed an unheard-of function: at its opening in 1985, The Normal Heart was one of the few sources of data on the epidemic anywhere. The war years began. My first ACT UP meeting was, like most feverishly political events, thrilling, necessary and endless. A downtown hall was packed to the rafters, with everyone from tattooed, sleeveless East Village hunks to Mount Sinai surgeons. The process was unbearably democratic. Everyone was allowed to speak, even the woman demanding funding for safe-sex dental dams for the lesbians of El Salvador. Whatever its excesses, or because of them, ACT UP radically changed the process of American medical research, demanding speedier trials to get, as the T shirts read, "drugs into bodies." Since ACT UP was primarily a gay organization, those T-shirt graphics were crucial, and committees of artists and advertising professionals signed on. From the SILENCE=DEATH logo to the late Keith Haring's cartoons of friendly condoms, AIDS has been a stylish blight. A community long accustomed to providing the trumpet lilies, striped tents and name entertainment for social events turned its gifts to fund raising. It was soon possible to attend the Ringling Brothers circus, a Jessye Norman recital and the Mr. Leather New York contest, all with checkbook in hand. I remember grabbing seats for the first preview of Nick and Nora, an ill-fated musical of 1991; the preview was partly an AIDS benefit, and ribbons were distributed. One civilian theatergoer, a middle-aged matron, needed the ribbons' significance explained to her. "Oh," she commented, "I thought they were just because it was the first preview." Sometimes when I watch the Oscars I still think, Oh, look, Susan Sarandon saw Nick and Nora. AIDS art boomed, producing masterworks like Tony Kushner's Pulitzer-winning Angels in America and any number of painfully well-intended, short-lived off-Broadway musicals in which the characters packed up dead lovers' cd collections while warbling ballads about the rainbow. There was a novel about a female teenage gymnast who contracted the disease through a transfusion; activists regarded such innocent-victim scenarios as evasive and insulting. Ferocious voices were preferred, from Kramer to journalist Randy Shilts to comic essayist David Feinberg, whose final collection, Queer and Loathing, included a detailed description of his AIDS-related diarrhea. Shilts and Feinberg are dead, along with Michael Bennett and Liberace and Robert Mapplethorpe and enough stars to fill a shelf of salacious biographies. Celebrity deaths served a grim purpose, because the press paid attention.
|
||||||||
