The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (24 page)

There is certainly a political dimension also, as many gay leaders claim. In America, homosexuality is illegal in twenty-three states plus the District of Columbia. In England we have the consenting-adults package: no sex until you are twenty-one, no 'public' sex in clubs and bars, and no group-sex whatever (even troilism is indictable). Despite much harassment and entrapment, these provisos are quite clearly unenforceable. Naturally, then, there is defiance involved, and celebration of the gains already made. Some gay activists even argue that the sexual liberation has worked as an opiate, deflecting the movement from progress of a more tangible kind.

'For fifteen years, we all had a party.' It was a time of dazzling freedoms and self-discoveries. In their new world, the distinctions of class, race, money and privilege were all triumphantly erased. Of course there were the expected perils and boredoms of any long party — the occupational hazard known as feeling 'gayed out'. How many more times (the gay man would wonder) will I wake up to hear myself saying, 'Well, Clint/Skip/Didier/Luigi/Piotr/ßasim, what brings you to our fair land?' But the great mix was, on the whole, a vivid and innocuous adventure, one that seemed to redress many past confusions. 'It was so good', as I was told many times, 'that you couldn't help thinking how it was going to end.’

There has been understandable resistance to the idea that
aids
is 'caused' by promiscuity. 'Life-styles don't kill people — germs do', says the New York pamphlet (perhaps a conscious echo of the National Rifle Association's maxim, 'Guns don't kill people -people do'). One vein of paranoia extends to the view that the epidemic was initiated by the CIA as a form of biological warfare. Certainly the profile of the high-risk groups — the j-H club — is politically effaced. As Larry Kramer, the author of one of five plays about
aids
recently staged in Manhattan, has pointed out: 'The lowliest of streetsweeper associations has twenty-five lobbyists in Washington, and we [14 million Americans] have one part-timer.' If the
aids
virus had chosen, say, real-estate agents or young mothers for attack, then the medical and social context would now look very different. Yet
aids
has chosen homosexual men. The proportion will certainly decrease (and the African epidemic has shown no sexual preference at all), but so far it has remained fairly steady at around 70 per cent.

Throughout the past decade, in New York, gay men were oppressed by an escalating series of health hazards. To begin with, crabs, gonorrhoea and syphilis, the ancient enemies. Then herpes, then cytomegalovirus, then gay-bowel syndrome, then hepatitis B. All venereal diseases compromise the immune system. And so, crucially, does semen. The vagina is evolutionarily designed to deactivate the antigens in semen, the foreign elements which stimulate the production of antibodies. The rectum does the opposite: it is designed to withdraw water from faeces, and so efficiently absorbs antigenic matter through the rectal walls. At each reception the immune system goes on red alert. Ironically, it too becomes paranoid. Repeated reception, repeated infection and repeated trauma prolong the crisis until the cells lose the capacity to correct their own over-corrections. The analogy is as much with cervical cancer as with standard sexual disease. Again, the double bind. It seems that there is a 'natural' — i.e. viciously arbitrary — limit to trauma, to bodily invasion.

There are two lines of thought. One is the single-factor or new-virus theory. This has always been more acceptable to the gay population because it passes no verdict and necessitates no change. The second theory is multi-factorial, the theory of immune-overload, which was immediately perceived in America as 'judgmental', suggesting also that the visitation of
aids
was not a bolt from the blue but a process or a journey. The virus — a retrovirus of a type found only in animals — has been cautiously identified. Yet it seems clear that the two theories are not mutually exclusive; indeed, they go hand in hand.

The secret may lie in an uncertainty principle, in the balance or
potentia
between two factors: the strength of the virus and the weakness of the host. A damaged immune system is susceptible to the
aids
virus, which then destroys that system, so inviting opportunistic infection. Some epidemiologists believe that
aids
is an ancient and world-wide disease of poverty (ineradicable by medicine alone), given passage into society at large through the incubation chambers of the bathhouses. In a sense, perhaps
aids
itself is opportunistic. This is the double jeopardy.

The Gay Men's Health Crisis Centre is just off rugged Eighth Avenue; but the offices are neat, modern, positively
bijou.
Up on the bulletin board is a list of the day's meetings: Volunteer Moral Committee, Care Partner Group One. There are bottle-glass partitions, basketed plants. I asked for the AIDS-information kit and was given a hefty dossier of facts and figures, dos and don'ts, posters and leaflets. The soft-voiced, tiptoeing advisers talk to the worried supplicants, like waiters in a gentle gay restaurant. 'Win With Us', says the slogan on the donation tin. 'We're Winning', says a pamphlet, ' ... Together. We're winning ... Through Respect'.

There are buddy programs, therapy groups, crisis counsellors, PR men. 'Our community keeps on fighting. Keeps on caring. Keeps on loving.' Here they are coping in the American way.

The British equivalent of GMHC, the Terence Higgins Trust, is at first as unwelcoming as its address: Block E, Room 10, number 38, on a street inaccurately called Mount Pleasant, near the Gray's Inn Road. Once you have blundered about a bit in this old warehouse, you enter the tiny, bumf-crammed office of THT. As the outpost in a revolution of consciousness and the epicentre in the fight against a latent epidemic, the premises are not immediately reassuring. But funds, private and public, are gathering, and Tony Whitehead, Chair of the Trust, is clearly exceptionally able and sympathetic. Until a year ago he was running the entire operation from his own flat. This is the English way: under-financed, under-organised, genially yet resolutely philanthropic.

Lessons have been well taken from the American experience. There are buddy-systems here too, and they are needed: the personal complications are often drastic.
aids,
with its usual double thrust, attacks the brain and nervous system of the hugely stressed patient, bringing about violent personality changes. The epidemic has so far followed the American graph, though the curve is unlikely to be as steep. The bathhouses and sex clubs of Manhattan are simply illegal here; and our new generation of junkies tend to sniff the stuff rather than mainline it. Even so there could be 10,000 cases by the end of the decade. And the THT will itself be the size of a hospital.

The DHSS withstood a lot of criticism, here and in America, when it took on powers to detain and quarantine
aids
sufferers. John Patten, the junior Health Minister, was quick to dismiss any fears of official panic or overkill. 'Good God, the last thing we want to do is start rounding people up." The new ruling has been invoked only once: in Portsmouth, where a distracted
aids
patient was haemor-rhaging in the street. Patten is addressing his task in discreet and avuncular fashion; he seemed quite unaware of gay sexual realities (believing, for instance, that 'fisting' was some form of spanking); but it is not the British way to look too closely at these matters, nor to sanitise them with the jargon of toleration. We shall all muddle through. One thing we do have (for the time being anyway): we have the National Health.

Meanwhile, everything has changed.
Being gay —
which Americans call a life-choice, and which we might perhaps call a destiny — is a different proposition now. But so is the other route, as
aids
becomes a part of the heterosexual experience. The liberation of coitus, the rutting revolution, has probably entered its last phase. When the danger is ultimate, then every risk is ultimate also. It is
over.

Despite new genetic technologies, any cure or prevention is probably some way ahead. 'We have anti-virals which
seem
to inhibit the retrovirus which
seems
to have a linchpin role,' I was informed at the
aids
Medical Foundation in New York. 'Prospects are uncertain bordering on grim.' The vaccine for hepatitis B took seventeen years.

But some hope can be rescued from the mess, the human disaster of
aids.
The disease will probably obey Darwinian rules and seek an evolutionarily stable strategy, becoming less virulent, non-fatal. The cure, when and if it comes, will revolutionise medicine. Sexual relations of all kinds will soften, and the emphasis will shift from performance, from sexual muscle. Gay leaders prudently stress the need for trust, for confidentiality in the liaison between the various communities. In the short term, of course, they are absolutely right. But a better situation would clearly be one in which no confidentiality is necessary.

aids
victims are in the forefront, at the very pinnacle of human suffering. Broadly speaking, they can do you no harm unless you elect to go to bed with them. We are in this together now. An opportunity presents itself. There is no good reason — only a lot of bad ones — why we shouldn't take it.

Observer
1985

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Postscript
This piece was written under unusual pressures. Early 1985 was the time when the British tabloids locked on to
aids.
Twice a week the headlines yelped of gay plagues and black deaths, blighted babies, panicking health workers, proposed quarantine, homosexual apartheid. I very much wanted not to add to the grief and vulnerability of the gay population, and I was greatly relieved when the piece went down well in that quarter, and also with the medical community.

Here is a minor, and personal, illustration of the ease with which one can get 'politicised' by such sensitive matters. A week after the
aids
piece appeared I was proudly reading a short story of mine, newly published though written months earlier. To my horror (and the shock was physical, dizzying, armpit-igniting) I saw that I — or my Jewish-American narrator — had used the word 'faggots'! The locution was right for the narrator and right for the story; but I shouldn't have used it. Not
now,
I thought. Already, after a few months, I have relapsed somewhat and would probably defend the original phrase (the story, after all, was set in 1980: pre-AIDS); but I won't forget the seizure of remorse when my eye fell on
faggots, ì
also began to understand the American tendency to euphemise with jargon, and its-misplaced homage to the power of the word.

Looking into
aids
taught me other things too. I had never read any medical literature before; and I am here to tell you, if you don't already know, that with or without
aids
there is a dictionary ten feet wide full of stuff that is just raring to screw you up. Secondly, I discovered I knew nothing whatever about homosexuality. Having learned a bit, I now find the condition, the fate, the destiny much more interesting, much more sympathetic — and much, much stranger. I had never registered the
otherness.
Nor, it seemed, had anyone else. The article caused a certain amount of unease and hesitation at the
Observer,
which, with the
Guardian,
is the most liberal and humanistic newspaper in Britain. Those traditions quickly prevailed and the piece appeared as planned, though with one or two changes and in an atmosphere of worry. I was obliged to amend 'fucking queer' to 'filthy queer' in the first paragraph; and I had to bowdlerise the description of how the rectum deals with bodily fluids. The first change was routine but the second change puzzled me at the time. Agreed, the rectum's job is not a particularly glamorous one; yet someone has to do it. Why this resistance to corporeal truth? Even in a near-impeccably enlightened institution like the
Observer
I glimpsed a measure of the intransigence, the reluctance to know, felt by society at large.

Anyway, I thought I played the whole thing down.
aids
is more frightening and catastrophic than I chose — or was able — to suggest. But I have enough imagination, and enough health anxieties of my own, to guess at the feelings of the sufferer, lying in the sawdust of his defences, with nothing between him and the wind and the rain. Also, I believe
aids
will emerge as an evolutionary trauma, a tactical defeat for the species. Sex and death have never before been linked in this way, except by the poets. The ancient venereal diseases were fatal but late-acting: plenty of things could kill you before syphilis did. Perhaps the only remote analogy is an exclusively feminine one: not cervical cancer, but childbirth. Now, with
aids,
the opportunities for human distrust are boundless.