Dry Bones Breathe

Gay Men Creating Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures

Eric Rofes

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317957621
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Medicina
• Categoría: Malattie e allergie

Dry Bones Breathe: Gay Men Creating Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures breaks new ground in offering an original and insightful interpretation of gay men's shifting experience of the AIDS epidemic. From Dry Bones Breathe, you'll gain a deeper understanding of current community debates focused on circuit parties, unprotected sex, and gay men's sexual cultures, and you will learn how social, political, and biomedical changes are dramatically transforming gay identities and cultures. Dry Bones Breathe is Eric Rofes'explosive follow-up to Reviving the Tribe, a book which broke open debates in gay communities around the world about sex, identity, and gay men's relationship to AIDS. In this volume, Rofes contends that most gay men no longer experience AIDS as the crisis they did during the 1980s. Gay men often attribute this shift to the advent of protozoa inhibitors, but Rofes explains how other factors, including the epidemic's predicted trajectory, new treatments for opportunistic infections, the passage of time, and the increasing diversity of gay men inhabiting communities throughout the country have set in motion the transformation of gay life. AIDS organizations and gay leaders, however, continue to assert that gay men experience AIDS as an emergency, resulting in a tremendous dissonance between gay leaders and their communities. In the midst of this controversy, Dry Bones Breathe lets you share in stories of hope and recovery and a new vision for AIDS work that demands a radical redesign of prevention, care, and activism. Dry Bones Breathe tackles several other issues concerning the powerful shifts occurring in gay communities and cultures by:

• explaining why an understanding of the terms "post-AIDS" and "post-crisis" is crucial to interpreting contemporary gay male cultures and what Australian prevention theorists have to offer gay men in the United States
• describing the "Protozoa Moment" and exploring how a dangerous obsession with pharmaceuticals is leading many to mistakenly attribute all changes in gay men's cultures to combination therapies
• examining the writings of Larry Kramer, Andrew Sullivan, Michelangelo Signorile, and Gabriel Rightly to illustrate how the crisis construct has unleashed a backlash against gay sexual cultures
• discussing the dramatic diminution in gay men's AIDS-related deaths in epicenter cities and the impact of shrinking obituary pages on gay men's mental health
• exploring the diverse relationships to the epidemic forged by young gay men, gay men of color, gay men from rural or small towns, and middle-aged men not infected with HI
• detailing how HI prevention and service organizations targeting gay men must redesign their mission and restructure their workIn response to continuing efforts to direct gay men back into a state of emergency, Dry Bones Breathe suggests that long-term prevention efforts must be constructed around something other than a crisis. While AIDS organizations look at gay men's diminished participation in AIDS activism, Rofes argues that these organizations should face how they have distanced themselves from the reality of most gay men's lives. From stories and experiences full of hope, anger, sadness, and strength, Dry Bones Breathe will teach you about gay men who no longer base their identities and cultures solely around AIDS.

Chapter 1 Now That It's Over

DOI: 10.4324/9781315865416-2

This is a strange and special time for many gay men in America. Rumors and stories about a changing AIDS epidemic swirl around our psyches, leaving us alternately hopeful and disbelieving. Pieces of information drop on us, trapping us in the middle of a jigsaw puzzle of confusion. Whispered conversations among friends and lovers tiptoe up to the question all of us want to ask but none of us feels prepared to address: Is the AIDS epidemic coming to an end?

In 1996, a variety of biomedical developments and cultural shifts came together to create a dramatic change in the communal mind-set of gay men throughout the nation. Early reports of the success of protease inhibitors and combination therapies led many to believe that the treatment for which we had yearned for years had arrived. Researchers at the International AIDS Conference in Vancouver hailed the impressive results of early trials. A few dared to use the word “cure,” and at least one gay newspaper’s front page was emblazoned with the headline, “Activist Says AIDS Is No Longer a Killer.”¹ Rumors circulated widely insisting doctors in Amsterdam had published reports on patients who supposedly had HIV fully eradicated from their systems.

During the same time, a variety of subtle, seemingly unrelated changes in urban gay cultural life coalesced to confirm our sense that a transformation was occurring. During our walks through gay neighborhoods and visits to gay venues we saw few young men using canes. When was the last time we saw a man pushing his lover down Castro Street in a wheelchair, once an everyday, poignant reminder of the epidemic? The obituaries that just a few years earlier had filled two or three pages of weekly gay papers had dwindled to half a page; some papers had stopped printing them entirely, eliminating the section, as if declaring it a product of a bygone era. In several cities, AIDS hospices and housing programs began to shut down, close wings, or accept non-AIDS patients, providing many with what seemed like tangible evidence that the epidemic was coming to an end. ²

Perhaps the most striking sign of a rapidly changing communal landscape—and the one that has triggered a range of powerful and ambivalent feelings—has been the rebirth of sexual cultures in hard-hit cities. The sparse landscape of commercial sex cultures we inhabited in the late 1980s again has bloomed into a diverse garden of sex clubs, bathhouses, and circuit parties, initiating changes unimaginable just a few years ago. A new bathhouse opened in New York, the first since most were ordered closed in 1985. As if deliberately calling attention to the dramatic shift it represents, it was located on a block adjacent to the headquarters of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, New York’s premiere AIDS organization. ³ A group of gay activists initiated efforts in 1997 to open a bathhouse in San Francisco, the city that closed down such clubs in 1984. ⁴

These factors, occurring simultaneously and with greatest impact on urban gay ghettos, have led some to feel AIDS is over. Men infected with HIV who have shown dramatic health improvement and increased energy as a result of combination therapies best exemplify the spirit of hope and optimism. Many are returning to work, resuming careers they had been forced to abandon in a cyclone of infections and exhaustion. Some have declared their AIDS diagnoses relics of the past, and embraced new identities as survivors. ⁵ Instead of confronting morbidity and mortality, they are being rocked by what the The New York Times has called “the jolt of facing a new life.” ⁶ Careers, boyfriends, credit card bills, and plans for old age, the flotsam and jetsam of everyday middle-class life, increasingly seize center stage as the epidemic recedes into the past, fading away like a very bad dream. AIDS seems over, and so we come back to life.

Yet for many people, AIDS is not over. In fact, it’s far from over. A discussion of the end of the epidemic strikes these people as bizarre, absurd, and deeply offensive. Those for whom new treatments have not worked, as well as those who do not have the funds, health care resources, inclination, or predictable patterns of living that allow for a strict regimen of pill taking, may react in horror at the suggestion. ⁷ Will their suffering and human needs be left behind while the culture moves on, writing about AIDS in the past tense? Populations such as African Americans and Latinos, who may be a few years behind epicenter gay communities in the caseload curve, and who currently are experiencing rising numbers of new infections, may be appalled at the suggestion that AIDS is over. ⁸ Developing nations, now home to the vast numbers of AIDS cases in the world, may be stunned at even the hint that the epidemic is ending. ⁹ They say, what about our people? What about us?

Harbingers of a New Era

I first became transfixed by gay men’s rapidly shifting conception of the AIDS epidemic during the spring of 1996. I had read bits and pieces about the new treatments but hadn’t given them much credence. After a decade of hopeful support for friends on everything from AZT to Compound Q to GP120, I found it difficult to summon up optimism about treatments.

A friend with whom I share tea at one of the ubiquitous queer coffeehouses in the Castro broke through what had become my habitual nonchalance. He had returned from a trip to the East Coast looking robust, energized, and, for the first time in years, happy. Our usual chit-chat of gossip and political griping was replaced by his enthusiastic recounting of what seemed to me to be a remarkable recovery from illnesses that had plagued him for a number of years. He talked about the reappearance of his libido, his return to the gym, and his reentry into local social scenes.

I was struck by the powerful transformation that had occurred in this man in the few months since I’d last seen him. Instead of somberly and with great ambivalence grappling with his approaching death, he was reconceptualizing his life possibilities and reengaging with the world. An escalating tendency toward isolation had been stopped in its tracks and he was now talking with gusto about trips to the Russian River (a Northern California gay resort area), evenings at dance clubs, and visits to the symphony. Like the biblical figure Lazarus, he seemed to have returned from the dead.

I can easily discount evidence of cultural shifts when a solitary informant is the source, so initially I did not take my discussion with this man seriously. I didn’t mention his transformation to anyone and, on a deep level of consciousness, I didn’t actually believe him. Instead, I viewed him as yet another friend with AIDS on his own path toward making sense and meaning from a senseless and meaningless epidemic. Ever generous of spirit when it costs me nothing, I told myself that, being uninfected myself, it would be wrong to judge him. I remembered the New Age mantra from the days of the early epidemic and repeated it to myself: “Love him, don’t judge him. Love him, don’t judge him….” Wasn’t I a benevolent guy?

Yet within a few weeks, I’d come upon other friends who were telling similar stories. One man whom I thought had died because I hadn’t seen him around our usual haunts, surprised me one morning at the gym. Having become accustomed to such weird occurrences over the past dozen years, I wasn’t too disturbed to see a ghost. Yet Julio wasn’t simply alive, he was his old hunky self—big arms, great legs, solid mass of butt. My first thought was that he’d joined my pal A1 and his cronies in their quest to beat wasting syndrome through the use of steroids. But before I knew it, Julio was rattling off lists of drugs of which I’d never heard, singing the praises of his physician, and complaining about having to live by an alarm clock. One ten-minute conversation yanked Julio out of the cemetery of my mind and placed him back in the mad whirl of San Francisco’s gym/bar/dance/party/sex culture.

Perhaps the man most responsible for shaking me awake to the changes occurring around me was my friend Tony. Tony was a young man, barely in his thirties, who had been infected with HIV for about ten years. During the first few years, he’d had no illnesses and showed no indication of slowing down his intense social life. On the rare occasion when I’d go to book readings, movie screenings, or fancy restaurants, Tony always seemed to be there, brimming with chatter about the dozens of other engagements he’d had that same week and commenting on this museum opening or that opera. Many people admired his zest for life and his apparently unlimited appetite for upscale dining and high culture.

Many also envied Tony for having an older, uninfected lover of significant wealth and achievement who supported both the socialite and the dilettante in the young man. Hence Tony had the opportunity and means to construct a life that at times seemed to emerge from middle-class fantasies. I’d met the husband only a few times, though they’d been together almost a decade. He was a handsome man in his sixties, enmeshed in a conservative professional career, who clearly adored Tony’s zany side and was neither manipulative nor judgmental of the younger man’s extravagant, and occasionally quirky, tastes. I felt no sense of exploitation or sugar-daddy power games between them, just enjoyment of each other’s company, an identical sense of humor, and a whole lot of love.

When Tony began experiencing AIDS-related illnesses about five years ago, his lover turned into a combination of Florence Nightingale and the Tooth Fairy. He provided constant care and support, while indulging Tony’s frequently outlandish requests. One winter when he was struggling with a bout of pneumocystis, Tony sorrowfully whined that he’d never had a fur coat. His lover made sure a full-length ermine coat was under the tree at Christmas.

Imagine my surprise when I ran into a healthy-looking Tony in line at the gay film festival and he told me he’d found a job working in a bookstore and left his lover for a man his own age. It seems Tony was one of the first in the city to be put on combination therapies (perhaps due to his lover’s wealth and influence) and his response was rapid and extraordinary. Within six weeks, he’d experienced a full turnaround in his health and his doctor was cautiously using terms like “remission” and calling his condition “manageable.” Tony had met Marc, a waiter at one of his favorite restaurants, and quickly reconsidered his current relationship, faced up to its limitations, and decided, in his words, “to go for it.” The spurned husband was severely dejected, though not vengeful, and left the door open for Tony’s return should life with Marc come to an unhappy ending.

Most of what I recall about seeing Tony at the film festival was that I was outraged at him for leaving his lover. Perhaps because I am the uninfected lover of an infected man, I immediately empathized with Tony’s lover and, under the surface, raged at my friend’s selfishness and lack of gratitude. The older man took care of his infected lover in sickness while, when health arrived, my friend exited the scene with a handsome younger man. Isn’t that what younger men have traditionally done to older men? Will this pattern be replicated by all the Lazaruses of the world, returning from the dead only to get buzz cuts, put on tight jeans and tank tops, and announce to their uninfected partners that, now that they are healthy, it’s time to end the relationship?

Yet quite apart from my judgments about Tony’s relationships, something was dawning in me, directly below the level of consciousness. I was becoming aware that men who were responding to these new therapies were in for a sea change in their life expectations, relationships, and core identities. This wasn’t simply another twist on what had become the roller-coaster ride of having AIDS. No, something new was happening here, something that had the potential to qualitatively change the texture of our collective lives in the epidemic. At that time I was not precisely sure what might happen and I can’t pretend I was convinced such changes would be long term or permanent. Yet it was becoming clear to me that the fragile foundation of gay community life amid the epidemic—the assumptions, processes, and understandings we’d collectively come to share—was about to be profoundly shaken.

While friends with AIDS who responded well to combination therapies were the most obvious sign of shifts in the epidemic, more subtle changes in daily life seemed to be harbingers of a new era. Whereas five and ten years earlier, the vast majority of my friends were HIV infected, now the balance had shifted in the other direction. Fewer invitations to memorial services came my way, and fewer phone calls from far-flung friends brought announcements of deaths.

I noticed this shift most dramatically when, over a period of a few weeks, two dear friends who had been long-term AIDS survivors died. I learned of Dick’s death in a shocking manner. I’d spoken to him the day I left for a week of travel and set up a lunch date for when I returned. While he’d suffered his first serious HIV-related illnesses over the previous six months, his spirits were good and he’d recently experienced significant improvement in his health. Just a few days later, while thumbing through The New York Times over breakfast in Seattle, I came upon his obituary. It felt as if the roof had fallen in.

Frank’s death followed, after he’d endured three months of tremendous suffering. Frank had been my closest friend throughout my dozen years’ sojourn in California and was the friend with whom I traveled overseas, participated in Gay Games festivities, and rented a house in Provincetown at the end of each summer. Together we shared holidays, went to street fairs, and attended motorcycle runs. He’d had AIDS since 1985 but had bounced back after any number of serious illnesses and was incredibly active and engaged with life.

In the end, cancer got him and got him bad, the same type of cancer that had killed his dad at age thirty-seven. While Frank’s friends, family, and caregivers never agreed on the role AIDS played in his final illness and death (we sparred about what should be stated in the obituary), for me his powerful decline over a brief period was marked by most of the maladies and manifestations of AIDS. ¹⁰ When he finally allowed himself to die, I felt that familiar awful mixture of gratitude and grief. But I told myself I was doing fine.

A few days after Frank’s death, these two losses blindsided me, as if I had been hit by a Mack truck while casually crossing the street. I created mental lists of reasons why these particular deaths might hit me so hard: Frank was my primary link to the disco years, Dick served as a kindly mentor to me for two decades, and both men were among the few surviving gay male pals from my years in Los Angeles.

Yet a few weeks later, something else dawned on me: prior to these losses, I’d gone for a year without a significant death. This had been the longest expanse of time in a dozen years that I’d been free from bedsides and suicides, morbidity and memorials. The deaths of two close friends in a short time, once so commonplace that such occurrences felt normal, now seemed shocking. It was as if the videotape of my life had been rewound and I was jolted back to 1985.

Noting my reaction to these deaths helped me realize changes were occurring. Statistics for cities such as San Francisco and New York clearly indicated that the peak years of deaths for gay men of my generation had been 1989–1995. ¹¹ Somehow I hadn’t realized that the contortions in my psyche and the bizarre deformations of daily life could recede. Nothing had prepared me for life after the tidal wave. After spending a dozen years tossed amid rough currents of terror and rage, grief and shock, what happens to the human spirit when it is finally washed back ashore, and rests peaceably in the sunshine?

What It Was Like and What It's Like Now

I believe many gay men in America today who have survived the first two decades of AIDS share a similar paradoxical situation. We inhabit worlds where suddenly fewer are sick and fewer are dying. The tremendous weight of loss has eased and the terror within has abated. It feels like we are taking our first deep breaths since 1981. It feels like AIDS, as we have known it, is over.

Yet people are still dying, not only people from whom middle-class white gay men often separate themselves—Latinos, blacks, drug users, women, poor people—but middle-class white gay men like Dick and Frank. ¹² And people are still getting infected, including new generations of young gay men. Many infected gay men remain on pins and needles, dreading new health problems, wondering whether their success on protease inhibitors represents the end of the storm or simply the eye of the hurricane. How can some of us have this feeling that AIDS is over when we have the knowledge that it is not? How can two such different understandings of what is happening around us coexist?

My answer here is neither easy nor simple. A stark shift has occurred that has produced conditions out of which these paradoxical feelings emerge. Those who have lived at the center of the cyclone since the early years of the epidemic—gay men in epicenter cities, people involved in AIDS ...