Oh, and paychecks from our disease-based jobs. But even with safe-sex workshops, queer-theory classes and immunology courses, all we have to show for it are boy bands and dot-coms. My “Here we are! Now entertain us” generation believed we’d grow up and save the sinking ship. We were supposed to have figured it out by now. The belated focus on less developed countries is welcome, but xenophobia and smugness in the West make it unlikely that any of us will really care. We are obsessed with the stock market, The New York Times is filled with vapid celebrity stories, and our political system has degenerated into selfish lobbying instead of working toward a greater social good, which might require more equitable distribution of resources. The ever-widening epidemic has coincided with unprecedented trends toward shallowness. This has become a deeply embedded determinant in the way I live my life. At the same time, I discover new consequences in myself: My willingness to step forward when someone is in trouble comes from having had to face, at an early age, that my friends are my responsibility.
I am still struggling with the same old questions about the isolation of the AIDS experience. Today, most of my friends are from organizations we created to strengthen our communities in the face of AIDS and invisibility in the gay mainstream.
In 1981, I met most of my gay black men friends at the piers, Man’s Country or Paradise Garage, and I made visits to a friend in the hospital whose lymph nodes were swollen - but doctors hesitated to call it GRID because he was black. I’ve learned things about society that I would have been happier not knowing. I wish I had not witnessed the ineptitude of the research and medical response - mistake after mistake and the same people are still in business. I wish I had not seen so many people’s desire for recognition, power, influence or money supercede a commitment to finding the best solution. These 20 years have been the saddest of times. Today I’m stunned to still be standing at all, let alone still being forced to care about this hideous cosmic joke. Twenty years ago, when word first got out, I went into a profound state of shock but thought, “Stick this horror out for three years, and it’ll be over.” As the epidemic went on and on, so did my grief, furor, anxiety and annoyance hat gay life had become a terrifying sci-fi movie.
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