Summary: It’s been a generation since the first ominous signs of the AIDS epidemic appeared among us. Since then, an entire queer generation has been born and come of age. The paradox of the AIDS epidemic has been that it not only forced the queer nation into an adult appreciation of the vagaries and uncertainties of life, but also into an adult willingness to participate in the ongoing life of the larger commonwealth of which we are an inescapable part. If Stonewall was our Lexington and Concord, the AIDS epidemic has been our Valley Forge, and out of it we have emerged battered but unbowed, scarred but unbroken, anguished yet tempered as in a refiner’s fire. In struggle we have overcome, and in dying we live.
On World AIDS Day, it’s hard to embrace the idea that since the AIDS crisis first emerged, an entire queer generation has been born, come of age, and assumed adult responsibilities, not just in the queer nation, but in the larger national community as a whole, all in a plague time.
Today, the mind travels back to July 3, 1981, to two concurrent newspaper items, one in the New York Times and the other in the Los Angeles Times, headlined “Rare Cancer Found in 41 Homosexuals.” To a boy in his teens, slowly coming to terms with his own non-normative sexuality, as I was that summer, these two articles hit me like Thomas Jefferson’s iconic “Firebell in the Night.” I had no empirical reason for doing so, but I nonetheless felt an inarticulable sense of dread come over me that I could not explain.
The history of the AIDS epidemic is too well known to require any extensive revisiting at this particular moment. But what is worth noting is that in those early days, the disease we now call AIDS was initially seen as an affliction peculiar to the gay community. Indeed, it was first referred to as GRID, or Gay Related Immune Disorder. Even today, while AIDS is an equal opportunity killer, the most serious effects of its visitation continue to be felt among heterosexuals in sub-Saharan Africa and among gay men in the industrialized nations of the West.
Because sub-Saharan black Africans and gay men have not historically been regarded as communities in which the rest of the world takes a great deal of interest, it’s not entirely surprising that AIDS should have been regarded as a somewhat exotic ailment happening to exotic people in exotic places. A generation ago, queerfolk were viewed as a kind of exotic subculture within American society. Exotic people like us only got weird and exotic diseases.
But in that intervening generation, queerfolk, particularly in the industrialized West, have made an astonishing transition from weird and exotic to quotidian and endotic. If, at the beginning of the 1980s, queerfolk were the kind of people to whom one did not necessarily want to “expose the children,” today we have become almost drearily respectable. We serve openly in Congress, in state legislatures, on county boards of supervisors, and city councils. We celebrate the Sacraments of our redemption, preach the Gospel, and solemnize the marriages of our straight neighbors. We live next door and make property values increase. In 35 American states Ruth can marry Naomi or Jonathan can tie the knot with David and the sky has not fallen. How far we have come in living memory since the days of Stonewall!
For if Stonewall was the queer nation’s Lexington and Concord, the AIDS crisis has been our Valley Forge. We learned how important it was to act up, to unleash power and to take purposeful steps to claim our rightful place as first-class citizens in the commonwealth. For the great paradox of the AIDS epidemic was that it forced us to emerge irrevocably from our collective social closet. The famous Hollywood mogul Sam Goldwyn once observed that he did not care what was said about him, as long as his name was spelled correctly. Like Goldwyn, the queer nation has come to a pragmatic understanding that that which gives us exposure and compels our straight neighbors to acknowledge our existence advances our cause.
And as we have emerged from the closet and made our inexorable way from the back of the bus to the driver’s seat, we have surmounted every hurdle our opponents have sought to raise against us. We have stormed and captured every citadel of exclusion, and as we have done so our endotic status has become an ineluctable fact of life. We have emerged battered but unbowed, scarred but unbroken, anguished yet tempered as in a refiner’s fire.
On World AIDS Day, we remember those whom we have lost, but we must also contemplate the paradox that in suffering we overcome; in dying, we live. By death, we, like Christ, have conquered death.
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