The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (23 page)

Just over half-way through this interminable book
(Thy Neighbour's Wife),
we are given a welcome pen-portrait of Dr Alex Comfort, the aged author
Joy of Sex
and its sequel,
More Joy of Sex.
Comfort is glimpsed in one of the rumpus-rooms of Sandstone Retreat, a Californian holiday camp dedicated to the proposition that everyone should go to bed with everyone else. Strolling naked through the clumps of threesomes and foursomes, the pot-bellies and appendix scars, suntans and tattoos, Dr Comfort regularly megs his cigar to 'join a friendly clutch of bodies and contribute to the merriment.’

But what is 'the nude biologist' up to here? You or I might think that the old goat was simply having a good time at the expense of equally deluded, undignified — but much younger — married couples. Actually, though, the Doc is hard at work. In the argot of Gay Talese (similarly engrossed in another part of the room), Comfort is a 'participating sex researcher' working in a 'non-laboratory situation': i.e. getting laid. Well, it's a living.

This is sexual quango-land. Mr Talese took a very long time to write and 'research'
Thy Neighbour's Wife.
His nine-year mission: to explore 'the social and sexual trends of the entire nation'. The research might have been fun, but the writing was a waste of time. As Mr Talese naïvely snoops from porno film-set to massage parlour, from obscenity trial to the offices of
Screw
magazine, as he talks to 'ordinary' troilists, wife-swappers and haggard masturba-tors, it slowly becomes clear that he has nothing of any interest to say on his chosen subject. Mr Talese calls this clueless style 'non-judgmental' - and he isn't kidding. Out goes judgment, and in comes jargon, stock-response and humourlessness through the same door. The book is a rag-bag of cliches, most of them about twenty years out of date.

Language is the key to the imposture. Although Mr Talese thinks that, for instance, a 'voluptuary' is a woman with big breasts, his book is not particularly ill-written. It is conscientious, even earnest. The trouble is that almost anyone could have written it. Mr Talese's prose has the stilted, rolling, lip-smacking nullity that has been satirised by Kurt Vonnegut and, more subtly, by J.G. Ballard. The style may be parodied at random: 'Each evening that summer, Keith Krankwinkel would motor out in his cream convertible to the Santa Monica duplex of Doris Dorkburger. As Doris prepared their first evening drinks, Keith would admire the graceful contours of her...' Ballard, most notably in
Vermilion Sands,
uses this style to suggest a kind of existence that is at once affluent and denatured, an existence free of volition or irony. Non-judgmental Talese, however, doesn't 'use' this style: it uses him.

In one of his many chapters on wife-swapping, Mr Talese explains that 'body pleasure' is 'wholesome' and 'therapeutic', it contributes to everyone's 'welfare and personal growth', leading to 'a healthier, more sex-affirmative and open society'. As Barbara Williamson sleeps with David in one chalet bedroom, and John Williamson sleeps with Carol next door, Barbara feels that she and her husband are sharing 'a gift of loving trust', in Mr Talese's ghastly phrase. Having slept with David again at dawn, Barbara makes breakfast, and is 'greeted in the living room by her husband's approving smile and kiss'.

Pleasure is good, Mr Talese believes, and guilt is bad; the idea is to have a lot of pleasure without feeling any guilt. It is indeed a noble dream. Mr Talese's hero in this department is Hugh Hefner, who claims a sizeable chunk of his book. Talese really has to hand it to Hef, and writes of him throughout with envious admiration. Here, after all, is a man who spends the leisure of his mature years being massaged by 'four or five' robotic Playmates of the Month on his circular $15,000 bed, constantly monitored by an Ampex television camera designed to produce 'instantaneous and delayed transmissions' on the wall screen above. Meanwhile, outside the Jacuzzi-infested mansion the 'sprawling green lawns' recede over 'gently rolling hills'.

Mr Talese raptly follows Hefner's seduction of a Texan beauty called Karen Christy, who was lured up to Chicago by one of
Playboy's
roving talent scouts. Hef, with his infectious enthusiasm and love of 'variety and spice', successfully chats Karen up on their first night and installs her as court favourite. Hefner goes on to give Karen a diamond watch, a white mink coat, a silver fox jacket, a diamond cocktail ring, a Matisse painting, a Persian cat, a white Mark IV Lfncoln, 'a beautiful metallic reproduction of the
Playboy
cover on which she was featured', and a nightly Mazola party on his circular bed. Mr Talese has this to say about the effect on Karen's personality: 'she remained essentially the same country girl she had been on the day of her arrival from Texas.' How extraordinary, if true. But the thought leads nowhere. Karen is a cliche, after all, for Hefner and for Talese.

In his final chapters Mr Talese records that at one point during his decade of energetic fieldwork, his wife suffered a 'negative reaction' to all the publicity he was getting: she left him. At this juncture (page 543) you might expect a suspicion of doubt, or of judgment, to intrude. Perhaps 'body pleasure' can't be sanitised; perhaps sex is as contingent as most aspects of life are. But Mr Talese went out to dinner and an interview with
New York
magazine. Two days later Mrs Talese came home. Lucky man.
Thy Neighbour's Wife
might have had some edge to it if she had stayed away.

Observer
1980

Witness this banal and quotidian incident. And then consider the ways in which it might affect all our lives.

A young man is walking home to his flat in Camden Town. In appearance he is, as they say, a 'Castro clone', modelled on the all-gay Castro Street area of San Francisco (where they have gay groceries, gay policemen, gay banks): short hair, regulation moustache, denim shirt and jeans, running shoes. In his path are two young women. They have their standard equipment too: lit cigarettes, tabloids under the arm, a push-chair apiece. As the young man passes the girls (and these are tough girls), they decide to say something. A year ago they might have contented themselves with 'Fucking queen!' or 'Fucking queer!' or 'Fucking poof!' But this year they have something new to say (remember those tabloids). It is: 'Fucking AiDS-carrierP The young man walks on. End of incident. Now, let us imagine that the accusation is unfounded. The young man gets back to his flat. He feels shaken-up, he feels
hurt,
in every sense. He wonders if he is an AIDS-carrier: conceivably (and he has done his reading too), he might be asymptomatic HTLV3-infected! He is At Risk, after all, and the symptoms are so damnably vague: fevers, chills, swollen glands, diarrhoea, dry cough, breathlessness. That bad night last week — was it a tummy upset, or was it Death? The young man has been considering whether to go down to Hammersmith and take the antibody test. He now decides against it. How can he safeguard his job, his flat? He feels no consensus of decency out there. Meanwhile the stress of the incident and the anxieties it has awakened are, infinitesimally, running him down, making inroads on his defences, weakening him for another kind of attack.

The two young mothers have also done themselves a bit of no good. By the time those babies are as old as their parents,
aids
will probably have shrugged off its homosexual associations (its origins may well be heterosexual anyway, but let that pass for now) and will be established in all areas of society. By then,
aids
could be the most common cause of disease-related death in young people, not just in young men — a status it already enjoys in New York and San Francisco. The young mothers have also done their bit to impede any early control of the epidemic, because such an effort will depend on an atmosphere of unwonted candour and trust. Incidentally, since the cost of caring for
aids
patients may reach £200 million annually by 1989, they have also helped deplete the health services on which their children will rely.

Finally let us re-run the incident and imagine that the accusation — the taunt — is true. The young man returns to his flat — and doesn't leave it for several days. As one of the large pool of 'AIDS-Related Complex' and 'Lesser
aids'
sufferers, his illnesses come and go in cycles, depending on natural resilience and general morale. Now they all begin again: the miseries of recurrence. This is the unique double bind of
aids.
The virus attacks the immune system, which (it appears) must be weakened enough to receive it; symptoms and prognosis invisibly interact; the sicker you are the sicker you get ... Those words on the street. Sticks and stones, perhaps. But, with
aids,
words too can break your bones.

Everywhere you look you see the double bind, the double jeopardy. In America — land of the profit-making casualty ward, home of the taxi-metered ambulance — the bipartite attack assumes its most heartless form. Growing ever weaker, the sick man faces medical bills that average $75,000 and have been known to reach half a million. The medical-insurance system is a shambles of pedantry and expedience. Some policies are soon exhausted; insurance companies often renege, claiming 'prior conditions'; if you lose your job you might lose your cover; and with the two-year waiting period to establish eligibility, 80 per cent of
aids
patients do not survive to draw their first cheque.

'What happens, usually, is a process of
spend-down,'
said Mark Senak of the
aids
Resource Centre.

'Spend-down?' I asked. I sat in Senak's chambers in downtown Manhattan. He is one of many young lawyers active on the AIDS-relief front. AIDS-sufferers need lawyers: to defend themselves against employers and landlords (in America, as in England, you can legally discriminate against homosexuals but not against the disabled); to transfer assets, to wrangle with insurance companies, to formulate declarations of bankruptcy. Lawyers like Senak have drafted wills for young men barely out of college. Wills, bills, audits, lawsuits — all that extra worry, boredom and threat.

Spend-down
turns out to be one of those cutely hyphenated nightmares of American life. Briefly, it means that you spend everything you have before qualifying for Medicaid. Until recently there were further complications. One
aids
patient was suffering from a rare opportunistic disease called cryptosporidiosis, normally found only in calves. He applied for social security, and was told that he couldn't have the money. Why? Because he couldn't have the disease.

Duly pauperised by
spend-down,
all spent out, the patient becomes eligible for a bed in one of the city hospitals. Here he will encounter the suspicion and contempt that America traditionally accords to its poor. There is no out-patient care, no intermediate care. He is not legally dischargeable unless he has a home to go to. And
aids
sufferers often do not know if they have a home to go to. You might return to find your remaining possessions stacked outside the door of your apartment. The locks might have been changed — by your landlord, or by your lover.

'What we have', said Senak, 'are diseased bag-persons living on the street. No one will house them. No one will
feed
them.' Senak's personal project is an accommodation centre for sufferers, on the San Francisco model. But the ruinous cost of real estate is only one of the difficulties. The risk categories for
aids
form a heterogeneous group, colloquially known as 'the 5-H club': haemophiliacs, Haitians, homosexuals, hookers and heroin-addicts (these last two frequently overlapping). How do you house a haemophiliac stockbroker with a Puerto Rican junkie? One of the reasons why
aids
is seen as a scourge of the homosexual community is that there
is
a homosexual community, however divided.

'I think we've made progress, in changing general attitudes, since the panic began in 1983. Tonight I'm going to see someone in hospital. A year ago I would have had to stop off and buy him some food. The hospital staff wouldn't take in his tray. But they do now.’

That same week in New York a TV crew — battle-scarred
conquistadores,
veterans of wars, revolutions, terrorist sieges — walked off a set rather than affix a microphone to an AiDS-sufferer's clothing.
No
one has ever caught
aids
through casual contact.
After four years of handling patientsVfood, laundry, bed-pans, drips and bandages, no health worker has yet succumbed. You cannot say this often enough. But how often will you have to say it? In the end one cannot avoid the conclusion that
aids
unites certain human themes — homosexuality, sexual disease, and death — about which society actively resists enlightenment. These are things that we are unwilling to address or think about. We don't
want
to understand them. We would rather fear them.

In New York, everyone on the public wing refers to
aids
patients as PWAs: persons with
aids.
'Why?' I asked a young administrator at the
aids
Medical Foundation. 'It's to avoid any suggestion of victim, sufferer, and so on.' 'Why?' I asked again. They are victims; they are sufferers. But the answer is of course 'political', New York being the most politicised city on earth. New York, where even supermarkets and greasy-spoons have their 'policies'; where all action seems to result from pressure, and never from a sane initiative.

Other euphemisms in this sphere include 'sexual preference' ('orientation* being considered 'judgmental'), 'sexually active' (some go further and talk of 'distributive' as opposed to 'focal' sex) and 'intravenous substance-abuser' (as if a junkie is going to feel much cheered or ennobled by this description). Over here, handicapped people are merely 'challenged', and the 'exceptional' child is the child with brain damage. It is a very American dishonesty — antiseptic spray from the verbal-sanitation department. Having named a painful reality (the belief seems to be), you also dispatch it; you get it off your desk.

In 1983 the total federal budget for the
aids
crisis was $2,8 million; in 1984 it was $61 million. But this was all grant-hound money, Nobel-race money: not a cent had been allocated to the treatment of patients. During the time of my stay in New York (this was late March 1985), the old tightrope-artist Mayor Koch came across with a $6.5 million package. He was responding to countless protests and petitions; more important (according to many observers), he was responding to the fact that 1985 is election year. The truth is that the New York record on
aids
compares woefully with that of San Francisco, which has long been a coordinated network of treatment and educational services, everything from bereavement-counselling to meals-on-wheels. San Francisco has also taken the controversial step of closing the gay bathhouses, by order of the health authorities. The
Village Voice
claimed that Koch has always been terrified of any association, pro or anti, with the gay cause. Remember the slogan: 'Vote for Cuomo, Not the Homo'? Koch quickly denounced this 'slander' as 'vile' and 'outrageous' — also 'irrelevant'. His confusions are plain enough; but so are those of the gay population, which remains as brittle and fragmented as any other stratum in this volatile city, the city of the omni-partisan.

In New York you will find every permutation of human response to the
aids
crisis. The bathhouses are still open here, and commercialised gay sex is still big business. Many gays see any move to limit their activity as an attack on the civil-rights front, an attempt to isolate, to 'pathologise'. More extreme are the 'disco dummies' who, even after contracting
aids
themselves, maintain or actually increase their sexual output. You hear talk of 'medical scenarios' in the bathhouses; you hear talk of sado-masochistic routines featuring
aids
as the ultimate 'sex death'; you hear talk of just about everything. The heterosexual community has reacted more predictably: the National Gay Task Force estimates incidents of violent harassment at about a thousand a month.

Throughout the history of sexual disease, injunctions to enforce celibacy or monogamy have never had the slightest effect. Then again, the stakes have never been so high. It is quite clear from statistics on routine complaints like gonorrhoea (down 50 per cent in some studies) that sexual activity has drastically decreased. Plainly a lot of thought, and lively improvisation, has already gone into this matter. Strategies include libido-suppressors and vitamin combinations, stress-reduction seminars, 'jerk-off circles and closed groups of 'clear' gays. There are even Orgiasts Anonymous services, where a sponsor 'talks you down' from an urge to visit the bathhouse. Such expedients may seem bizarre to the straight world. But that is because the straight world expects the gay man to follow its own sexual master-mould. And he doesn't. Homosexuality isn't a
version
of heterosexuality. It is something else again.

*

The consoling idea or the quietly monogamous gay couple is an indolent and sentimental myth. With a large number of exceptions, and all sorts of varieties of degree, it just isn't like that. Friendship, companionship, fellowship — these are paramount; but pairing-and-bonding on the wedlock model is our own dated fiction. Gay lovers seldom maintain any sexual interest in each other for more than a year or two. The relationship may remain 'focal', may well be lifelong, yet the sex soon reverts to the 'distributive'.

Gay men routinely achieve feats of promiscuity that the most fanatical womaniser could only whistle at. In the heterosexual world you might encounter the odd champion satyromaniac who — doing nothing else, all his life — accumulates perhaps a thousand conquests. On some fringes of the gay world (where a man might average ninety 'contacts' a month) you could reach this total in less than a year. In the right club or bathhouse, you could have sex with half a dozen different men without once exchanging a word.

However this may be, the median number of sexual partners for gay American
aids
patients is over eleven hundred. The exponential leap is easily explained. Most obviously, both actors in the sexual drama have the same role; they are both hunters, and can dispense with the usual preliminaries and reassurances (try taking someone to the opera ninety times a week). Also the gay man, more often than not, is making up for lost time. Throughout his youth he has felt excluded, unstable — illegal; even as an adult much of his daily life is spent incognito, in imitation of a mainstream citizen; but at night he joins an extraverted and hedonistic brotherhood. You could cite genetic factors too. Just as the gay woman seems to exemplify the usual feminine imperatives (monogamy, inconspi-cuousness, site-tenacity), so the gay man, in equally intense, redoubled form, does as his DNA tells him: he is mobile, aggressive and disseminatory.