Today I co-presented a workshop on writing about AIDS for the local gay and lesbian writer's festival. During the months of arranging for this workshop, I'd worried that the overlap between the HIV and writing communities here was small or nonexistent – which is probably true; but we managed to guilt some of our friends and fellow writers into showing up anyway, and so we had enough people (eight in all, including both of us presenting, which was a comfortable number).
I did my usual schtick – overview of art about AIDS; I was, somewhat unusually for these presentations, the only positive person in the room. Which ended up identifying me as The Representative Sample, as it were; among the usual discussions, I said something I've said several times in the past few months – that I've ultimately identified too much with AIDS, that increasingly I've made my life revolve around it, and I'm aware that that is rather silly of me. (Which, not entirely incidentally, probably indicates that I'm at a point where I can start to live out beyond it – although both my research and my volunteer work tend to drag me back in.)
Anyway: the structure of the writing part was for each of us to write a sentence about our experience with AIDS, and pass it to someone else to continue. Claire, a handsome young woman who is also a dramatic and accomplished performance poet, gave me the following sentence:
All through my teenage years, me and my peers were bombarded with four words: 'Don't die of ignorance'.
The shock of those times: no wonder the slogans were so merciless – don't die of ignorance, safe sex is good sex, silence equals death. No room for argument, no space to wiggle through: you can read between the lines of all those huge posters – actually, between the individual letters, those great big seventy-two-point Helvetica letters, booming down at you like a speaker coming out with Big Brother's voice.
I mean, I sympathize of course – all those doctors, social workers, government policy makers, faced with the exotic, chaotic scariness of Sex. With a capital S, naturally. The secrecy of sex, the difficulty of legislating it, because it's so hard to talk about – well it is for me anyway, whenever guys would ask, what do you like to do?, I'd turn all dumb and blushing.
But that's where the problem is, isn't it? The shapes of all our thoughts, our days, the ways we walk through the streets, all are overlaid on top of our passions – they take their shapes from what's hidden, from what's hot. And, for me, just as I was figuring out what was underneath, to have so much change all at once –
I wish it had all, always, been different: as though our lives were lived under palm trees, near white beaches, in circles of huts, our needs immediate, our friends affectionate, and funny, and difficult, and demanding.
And alive.
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