in the hall of mirrors

Making oneself crazy

... or should that be: making one's self crazy?...

In the interstices of watching these films, and scanning Joyce's thesis so I can report on it (the airplane and hotel for her defense in Paris are already organized – which reminds me: I also need to buy a flight to Washington to attend my eldest sister's memorial), I've been trying to read only books related to AIDS: easy enough in terms of finding them (they are all on four-and-a-half three-foot shelves – yes, there are a lot of them), but of course rather difficult in terms of finding the emotional patience to stick with them.

So, I made what seemed an easy choice: Hervé Guibert's Paradise, one of his last novels – which is, I think, the first Guibert I've finished. They are mostly quite short, and gracefully readable, in English or in French; but, well, do I have to explain why I don't always finish novels about AIDS?... okay, well, let's face it, they're mostly downers.

This one is very good, if perhaps a little too heterosexual for my tastes; but, although I expected the ending to be fairly wrenching, I wasn't quite ready for the chaotic skill and range of it – hugely disorienting and upsetting, really, not so much because of any individual passages (although they included torrents of images suggesting infection, sex, betrayal, death, and damage) as because of the entire dementia-ridden nightmare of disconnections: although it is not difficult to imagine the dislocations and inconsistencies of a novel that ends in dementia (at least not for anyone who became accustomed to Robbe-Grillet or Burroughs or a mass of writers since them), a skilled writer like this one can make you experience it, perhaps more than you would like.

(It made me think of my own drafted, probably-never-to-be-finished novel, and its considerably gentler dementia-oriented ending – which you can read towards the end of my long blog entry The Voyage to Europe; and that connection was actually rather encouraging, as it occurs to me that if I am incapable of writing a long novel, perhaps a short one would do. Well, maybe someday.)

It was really fairly crazy-making: and wonderful, and impressive – far more so than Collard's shallower egotism, in fact. But it was definitely a rapid and uncomfortable descent into the maelstrom: a kind of reading, thinking, and in fact remembering that I tend to avoid these days.

So it's nice to realize, yet again: I can handle it....

•••

But, after some hours of restless sleep while stormy winds beat the windows – and I don't mean sleep at night: finishing the novel at midday led to an afternoon of avoidant, depressive unconsciousness – I woke around dinnertime, had some tea, and put on a CD.

And how beautiful, how wonderful a piece was given to me, to make me feel better, more able to get back to work, to living: Robert Sessions' beloved piano miniatures From My Diary (1940), which I used to play back when I had a piano in the house. (Yes, I agree: it would be good for me to have a piano here – we'll see.) I suspect that many music students know these works, as they were examples in some popular music theory/history anthologies; I wonder if those other musicians remember these tiny, amazingly human pieces with as much affection as I do.

Best of all: the lovely, shimmering space outlined in the first miniature, between the pedaled bass and the answering quasi-harmonics of the treble....

•••

A small addendum on Guibert, after reading what others have to say about him online: it may seem ridiculous to complain of Collard's egotism, compared to Guibert's – very well, Guibert spent his entire life writing about himself, photographing himself, trying to meet important people to aggrandize himself, etc. – but Guibert's egotism doesn't bother me: it's not only more skillful, it is also not so shallow – Guibert is obsessed with himself not because it [he] is himself, but because that's what he knows best. Though it is amusing to see how irritating his self-obsessed success must have been for other Parisians (Duras hated him, and threatened to leave a major publisher unless they stopped showcasing him), it doesn't seem terribly important – he is an interesting writer, and of course nine-tenths of the successful artists of London, New York, Paris, Los Angeles, and other major cities are guilty of the same self-advertisement, the same manipulations, the same 'planned' friendships....

Les nuits fauves

I'll admit it: Savage Nights (Les nuits fauves), Cyril Collard's famous 1992 film about being bisexual, HIV+, and careless – by which I mean: really fucking careless: having sex with someone without telling them – is at least as exasperating as it is impressive. Does that make me a fuddy-duddy?...

Lots of drama about rebellion and being independent... and French quasi-intellectual messing around, complete with cigarettes, fights, threats and existential babbling. But, unlike Gregg Araki's The Living End (same year, similar concerns – and a film I dislike even more than this one), Collard's character isn't too young, dysfunctional and screwed up to know what he's doing. This is an educated young man, talented, capable, comfortable, who just wants to pretend he's not positive – without caring much about anybody else.

I've always been concerned that Foucault, whom I so respect, may have acted a bit like this....

Although I confess, I absolutely love the scene where, when a group of skinheads are attacking an Arab, he cuts his hand and threatens their leader with infection. And they back off – HIV becomes a weapon. And I can go with the ending... though I'm not sure he earns it (at least not – and I know it's cruel of me to say this as he died soon afterwards – not within the film).

But the infection bit... it reminds me of a creepy guy I know in Darlington, obviously wasting (and thus self-evidently with a non-negligible viral load) who justified not telling the many guys he had anonymous sex with that he was positive. Fortunately, he is by far the worst example I've known in twenty-five years; unfortunately, since I laid down the law to him, he no longer even talks to me.

Maybe it's the cheap justifications that repulse me so: if you're lying to yourself and to other people, and they aren't even the same lies, how can you expect...?

Stupid, stupid people.

•••

Later, after a drink: I'll admit, though I still think Collard was narcissistic and manipulative, he did indeed get to me. He's managed to make me feel careful: it's the old trope of Avoiding Life – which also assumes, Latin-style, that Life includes violence, stupid fights, threats, and doing incredibly vile things to other people – but now I wish I had a bit more of that left in me... aargh.

Of course, when I was younger, I was willing to allow awful things to happen to myself: but not to other people, there I drew a heavy black line. Perhaps that's why I ended up alone.

This will pass.

•••

And still later – and perhaps rather obviously: because, for years now, I don't have new experiences, I just revisit old ones by reading old poems, stories, writings; because there is no motion in my emotional life; and because I talk to medical students, in charmingly reasonable terms, about my experiences over the past twenty-five years, but obviously that's not the same as actually having those experiences; therefore going into these films, these songs, these novels, is actually creating new feelings: because even if I have had these ideas before, feelings are obviously not re-felt in the same way that ideas are.

That's the really tough part about doing this work: wading through new feelings, about AIDS....

The tough stuff

I am watching AIDS films, while working on the book about music and AIDS: this may be the toughest material to pay attention to – most of the songs I will write about later are much shorter than the films, except of course the musicals, which are in their turn more artificial and therefore (mostly) not as affecting. But the films are, of course, naturalistic (or mostly so), and dramatic and tear-jerking, etc., so watching these is a bit like jumping into the deep end of this work.

(Or perhaps I'm wrong – because, in a different way, it will of course be extremely hard to listen to Diamanda Galás' music, or perhaps to hear a lot of difficult pop songs, or... anyway, this feels very difficult right now.)

Jeffrey (1994) is a comedy, light and funny and... but I cried through half of it anyway. If that one is so hard to watch, how will I get through something really tough like Longtime Companion?...

On the other hand, perhaps Jeffrey is difficult to watch because it's about fear and not having sex. With, of all people, Michael Weiss (pictured above)... sigh. This possibility is confirmed by watching the respectable but now rather clunky-looking documentary Absolutely Positive (1991) or the unfortunately schlocky, though admittedly realistic, It's My Party (1996), neither of which, as it turns out, bothers me much at all....

***

II. Another chance

... Later, getting through Parting Glances (1986) has its own complications: when it first came out in theaters, I went to see it with my best friend Kevin, but I fled after the second scene when one of the leads cuts his hand in the kitchen of a friend who has AIDS. I thought, as it turned out incorrectly, I knew what was coming: a dramatic tragedy of infection... I was offended enough to skip out on my friend, the film, everything. (Was this shortly before my own diagnosis – which I remember perfectly well was April 1987 – or by any chance did I see the film after?...) And, despite having owned the DVD for several years, I've never seen it before now....

Welcome (back) to the 80s.

***

III. Monumentum pro 1986

Halfway through Parting Glances, at a point where I'm thinking: I seriously have to go talk to someone, do something, that gets me away from watching movies about AIDS – Patrick texts me that he and his visitor from Bristol are going out and I should come along. After a bit of testiness that he texted me so late (I know, I should be pleased he did it at all – but I depend on him perhaps too much for companionship, given how little I get from anyone else here), I shower and go out around midnight, eventually finding them in the main local gay nightclub.

And, for the ensuing four hours or so, proceed to have what feels at points like a quasi-1980s experience, mixed irregularly with fragments of twenty-first-century provincial Britain: the music, the lights, (some of) the guys. A massive steroid-built, tattooed behemoth bouncing across the floor like a medicine ball. Shy, feral Northern lads. A chunky, gentle-looking young man with a face one could come to love, trailing around behind a more sharply dressed pair of gym-builts (just as I am trailing around behind Patrick and Colin). Vast numbers of trampily arrayed, shrieking northern women. And, once, a remix of that peculiarly disturbing disco version of Barber's Adagio for Strings rings sadly across the floor, but everyone dances just as they do for anything else.

Finally, around four a.m., at a point where things no longer resemble 1980s clubs (when, in fact, people start to stagger a lot – northern Brits are not sensitive about motor skills, as they like to get really, really smashed), I gracefully take my leave and come home.

But, I'll admit: it was fairly, well, resonant....

Witness

[Speech for World AIDS Day, 2007]

Today is the twentieth World AIDS Day; the first was held in 1988, after the UN named December first as our day to remember, witness, and celebrate the lives of people with HIV and AIDS. Of course, every year World AIDS Day has a theme; this year it’s a long-winded one – “Stop AIDS: Keep the Promise – Leadership.” This is the third year they’ve had a theme about Keep the Promise, a worldwide campaign aiming for universal access to medications, all over the world, by 2010 – just three years away.

Most people admit that the prospect of keeping that promise doesn’t look very good – not enough has been done. A couple of days ago, Gordon Brown met with AIDS activists at Downing Street; Stop AIDS Newcastle has made postcards that you can use to give Brown and your MP an extra push to do something about the promise. And today, for some reason, Bush – not someone we’re accustomed to think of as a friend – asked to double the amount of money dedicated to AIDS. So maybe our leaders will do something to bring that promise closer to reality; and perhaps some of you can join the leadership of that promise yourselves, and make it happen.

Twenty World AIDS Days, and at least twenty-six years of the crisis: other members of the Newcastle patient group are probably as amazed as I am that they’re still around after so many years. We’re astonished that we reached middle age – it’s unbelievable to me that I’m fifty-one next week, like most of us I never expected to get much past thirty – and maybe we can use those years of experience to help those who haven’t been part of the crisis for long, to help governments to keep their promises, and to have these [hold up pills] available for everyone who needs them.

•••

I’ve been thinking lately of witnessing – being a witness, a phrase that came up a lot around AIDS and HIV over the past twenty-six years. Being a witness is being present at something, seeing something – not turning away, not being unwilling to see it. That has sometimes been hard: to see people suffering, to see people dying – to see yourself suffering, and to stay with it, pay attention, see it through to the end. Witnessing someone’s death, for instance, can be very hard – but many agree that it can also be one of the greatest privileges you can experience: the connection to the person who is dying, the sense of what is real, what is important, hits you so strongly that you can never forget it. In fact, it changes you forever.

Of course witnessing isn’t always that intense – we witness people talking about their lives, about being stigmatized or supported, about the love and sometimes the hate they receive. And witnessing is often just being present – as you’re all present today. But that’s not always easy, either: this year we brought together the organizers and activities of the Eyes Open gallery showings with the World AIDS Day vigil we’ve held for the past three years, and marched the whole thing through the middle of the town – and that was a big problem for some people. The fact is, a lot of people and organizations were unwilling to march today, because it was outside, in the open, where anyone might see them. It may be hard to imagine in 2007, but there are people who are terrified of being seen to be associated with AIDS, people who are frightened that their friends and neighbors might find out, even organizations that have to be careful in case vandals smash their windows.

Of course, we can witness that too: we need to see, and remember, how hard it can be to be a witness – that it takes a lot of courage just to stand and pay attention, to watch what is happening to the people around you, even to yourself. Maybe that’s why we have silent vigils – for a minute or two, we don’t talk, we don’t run around, it looks as though we aren’t doing anything at all – well, that’s when we are witnessing, watching and remembering and standing firm in our determination not to be washed away.

When you think of witnessing, you can’t help but think of testifying: saying what you saw, what you felt, to people who weren’t there, who don’t know what happened. Of course that’s even harder – for some people it feels like putting yourself in the line of fire, sticking your head up above the trenches on a battleground of stigma and prejudice. But when we do it together, then maybe we have a chance; and maybe people hear us differently, see the crisis differently.

So: we witness who we are, witness our own suffering, the suffering of friends and neighbors, of people we barely know, or don’t know at all; and increasingly in the past decade we witness the whole world – I’m always amazed at the student Stop AIDS groups that are so much more conscious of, and concerned about, Africa than any of us were in the 1980s or 1990s; it’s kind of thrilling, really.

And when we’ve witnessed our lives and the lives of others, just maybe, when it’s down to the wire, when it really matters, we’ll be ready to testify: to say who we were, what we did, and everything, absolutely everything, that we saw.

[Newcastle, December 1, 2007]

W.A.D.

Happy World AIDS Day.

Merry World AIDS Day...? Have a very merry, holly jolly World AIDS Day? – hmm doesn't quite work, does it. We definitely need a different way of talking about our holidays.

I am, as anyone might have expected, still fussing over my unwritten speech for today. I was first asked to give one in 2004, and my immediate experience of traveling gave me material for a successful tour de force; speeches in 2005 and 2006 were okay, but it was hard to find anything with quite so much impact.

It'll be more complicated today, because instead of a quiet indoor vigil, not really competing with the big political gallery event, they've been put together into a march and a (at times rather loud – do we really have three percussion groups?) 'celebration' at the local concert hall. Oh well, I know it's not about the rhetorical flourishes, I can just introduce people and mention a few big statistics and such.

I wonder if Churchill had these problems?... of course, "blood, sweat and tears" sounds a bit nasty in a viral context.

•••

Other fragments of other days... Mitchell visited from Los Angeles for three days; that was fun, and in fact very enjoyable from several angles, even when we briefly got peeved at each other. He got along fabulously with Patrick – their minds interlock quite well, and Patrick is always so happy to meet anyone who really understands what he's talking about.

While he was here, I kept talking, in a rather incoherent way, about a big house in the country where the people who matter to me could find a place to live: separate apartments (Mitchell said "chambers"), but shared rooms, kitchens, etc. I suppose I'm rather afraid of the financial, emotional and logistical future, for myself and for them – and it would seem so ridiculous if I, Mitchell, Trisha, Sophie, Patrick, Susan H., and all the others living alone and trying to get through middle age – and fairly soon older age – were stuck doing it in isolated apartments here and there. Oh well; perhaps I should have moved to the ashram years ago....

My dear John, from Australia, sent a long message with lots of pictures (he's as beautiful as ever in the 'normal' pictures, but I will confess to finding the bronzed-and-oiled bodybuilding pictures a a bit peculiar – I shall assume it's a laudable fad; he did win, after all, and now he can just make sure he lets his body come back to normal, carefully). He's doing well, and gave some background on the new Australian political situation; and invited me there... well, we'll see.

•••

All right: rather obviously, I have to go work on this speech. About five or six hours left – and then of course there's the proposal due to Fred, and a shortened version of the presentation for him to give in Mexico....

Back to work.

A puzzlement

I've realized something a bit peculiar about the London responses to my presentation about music and AIDS.

One of the questions – really a sweeping statement – was from someone who said they had a friend who hadn't liked to tell people he was HIV+. (Amusingly, I could figure out from his elaborate circumlocutions that he was talking about David O.-S., who obviously didn't care what people thought – he just didn't want to bother with their preconceptions and prejudices.) Somehow that seemed to the questioner a significant point: why would these musicians want to go public with HIV status, with identity positions, with emotions?...

Then I received an e-mail from another participant that asked the same question in a different way: and claimed that this would be the most significant concern for most listeners.

The question seems to me utterly beside the point: what does it prove that you know someone who does not want to disclose their status? It's clearly a personal choice, appropriate in different circumstances; and analyzing whether there are social pressures on both sides seems a bit unnecessary, as most of the psychological and social literature (and in fact practically every newspaper article or television documentary) points out the same thing. Does disclosure make these more public figures (and my own public figure) problematic, or does it discredit them, or something?

It appears that, for these Londoners, disclosure is a bit shocking, or a bit shameful, or a bit ridiculous, and needs to be explained. Faced with all this data, and all the complicated cultural and aesthetic questions that arise from it, their first response is: but why would you discuss all this in public?... and they keep returning to the question, as a dog worries a bone.

If I were back in Hong Kong, and the Chinese were asking me, I would think to myself: ah yes, a face culture, a shame culture, where public image is so important – no wonder they are bothered by this. But it seems so peculiar – this isn't, after all, Victorian or even Edwardian, it's twenty-first century London – doesn't it seem odd to you, that they can't let go of this trivial discussion?...

Signs

[Los Angeles, 1992]

The session chair is standing, the first paper is over, and through a long wave of applause intended for someone else I move through a labyrinth of aisles towards the stage. I’m wearing khakis, emblematic of the Eastern aristocracy, the conservative controllers who went to school with me; shoes beige and just too light to seem quite serious. The chair is introducing me, pausing, trying to remember exactly who I am: he looks at me for confirmation, clues, but I pause, silent and confused, before I start to speak: “I was at the –” He remembers suddenly, cuts me off, and shifts smoothly into a lecturer’s drone, handing out my credentials in the standard order. They are mostly correct. I nod to the audience, settling our relationship into a stable and predictable one, but then ruin it: I pull up a large black leather upholstered piano bench and sit, straight and, hopefully, dignified; but of course the other speakers all stood. Well, last night was very tiring, I really need to sit down.

No tie, I should have worn a tie, and I shouldn’t have this pinstriped blue business shirt open at the throat: not, definitely not, two buttons open, that’s far too much, I discreetly button up the second while shuffling papers, looking as though I’m aimlessly fooling with the shirt front. The shirt itself is conservative, a bid for a Connecticut WASP kind of credibility. I begin introducing my paper, talking about what I’m going to say, preluding everything: the subtly planned hook of the beginning, my dedication to a dead man, and I say the dread word AIDS without flinching or emphasis. The word ‘gay’ is frankly stated in this clearly heterosexual environment, they are academically, liberally calm, but on some of the quieter ones, the men with the correct ties or women with their hair in a bun, there is a momentary look of panic: did they think they were safe from sex, protected from the body in the academy, did they think that the university would keep all this away from them? I love that panic: shocking the bourgeoisie, an old habit from my avant-garde days. I should unbutton that second button again, I always had a strong neck, a square collarbone – no, I’m droning into the main part of the paper, I can’t unbutton it, that would be too obvious. I do wish I’d worn a tie, I’d feel solid, sure, in control, taking advantage of male privilege to coast through this paper. On the other hand, there are the marks on my neck, where the doctor burned off a number of small disfiguring bumps two days ago: they don’t look good, scattered small blistering scabs. It’s like being marked, but people don’t know that they’re from a damaged immune system: those little bumps mark us unless we take out after them, attack as soon as we are attacked.

Moving smoothly into a long abstract patch, will they understand any of this? and if I go too fast they won’t have a chance, I unfold a complex matrix of arguments, stepping carefully and quickly around a rather flimsy link in the chain, I hope no one noticed. Shifting forward on the stool, the comforting, damp softness of the black, soft leather. It helps me to keep going, which is difficult given the fog still hanging in my head, that rich dinner last night: you can tell from my pale face that there were three wines, a sweet aperitif wine followed by a dry white over the first course and then a deep, sharp red, then ending with the rather disappointing champagne that I’d brought.

Moving into my conclusions, tying it all up: making one last mention of AIDS, of people who’ve died. If you only knew, my scholarly audience, my own deep ties to those deaths: the loved men, the dissolving general hopes, the prefiguration of my own death: although I’m still in pretty good shape, there’s nothing to worry about in the next year or two. I like to think.

Ah. Conclusions, and not a moment too soon: I’ve been stumbling too much in the last two pages, my vocal cords fighting through the gunk of this morning after. End. Applause, their eyes distinctly warm, the supposed objectivity of academics up against the pleasure of an interesting paper. Because it certainly is interesting, I know that much. There is a question, easy to handle, I dispose of it neatly. Another one, more broadly stated and positioned, and I start to have trouble: what am I talking about? Am I answering the question he’s asking? I look up at my questioner and pause, trying to sort out my position, my arguments. His eyes are warmly sympathetic, even more than I’d expect, of course we all know what it’s like to be up here in the hot spot. I become aware that some are looking sympathetic, others are looking down or aside. I stop again –

And then the ground opens before me. I suddenly see what they are thinking, see it with perfect clarity. This isn’t sympathy around a difficult question, the genteel encouragement of senior colleagues: it’s my pale face, the scabs on my neck, I’m sitting holding onto the bench and talking through phlegm, I mentioned AIDS as a hint, as a warning, and they’ve guessed much too much. They know, they all know my story, but they’ve gotten it wrong: seeing the signs of my fragility, my illness, they think I’m making some supreme effort, fighting through death in order to – oh my God. Blinking at them, mumbling an excuse and pulling papers together, leaving the stage clumsily, too hastily amid the growing kindly applause. Thank you, thank you. So kind, so supportive of what they think must be just about my last, I can’t hold on to all of this, I wanted understanding, sympathy, but not this, they must stop clapping, they shouldn’t smile in that melancholy way, gentle eyes boring into me, I’m trembling as I sit, they’ll see it and misunderstand, I’m choking, strangling, can’t stand them all so kind because I’m still alive –

[Los Angeles, 3/7-4/1/92]

On the second day of Christmas...

December 26, 1995 – San Francisco

This evening something rather unexpected happened... I had been exchanging gifts at the largest department store in San Francisco (you'd think Lars would know that I wear a medium shirt by now), and dragged home, fairly tired, on the subway. My regular train didn't come, so I took one which puts me out of my way about five blocks; during the walk, along a quiet residential street with a few streetlights, I passed a Victorian house with two men sitting on the front steps, drinking what looked like eggnog. One of them hailed me – "Hello, how are you," or something similar – and I paused for just a second; then he said, "Do you play the piano?" I was surprised, but said, Yes... and he said, "My friend Carl, used to be a piano teacher, he's pretty sick, and he'd like it if you'd play something for him."

Here I felt somewhat caught out – I'm not much of a pianist (let's face it, I was a singer who banged out a few things on the piano, at the very best). But I could hardly refuse... so he led me into a rather strange drawing room (bourgeois and fairly well off, but with odd hand–made decorations with lots of glittering things, and various religious symbols scattered around), and I put my jacket and shopping bag on a chair and sat down to an electric piano... I said, well, maybe I can play one thing, but I probably won't remember anything else. He told me, that's fine, Carl's in the next room, and he was a teacher; so it doesn't have to be perfect, he just wants to know that the piano is being played.

I was feeling somewhat trapped – not by him, he was perfectly nice, but by my own limitations at the instrument... anyway, I banged my way through Couperin's Les baricades misterieuses, and most of one of Chopin's Nouvelles études (the one with the 2–against–3 stuff), which are practically the only pieces I can get through without the music anymore. The situation felt safe, but odd, as though I had fallen into an O. Henry story – and my own rather frantic self–criticism was the biggest concern of all. (Electric pianos seem so different – was my left hand really that heavy? And why do the pedals seem rather strange?) I stopped and looked over the controls for the volume, etc.; the man asked me if I had been brought up Christian, which I answered rather evasively (I always do).

Then someone – Carl, of course – began moaning in pain in the next room. ("Pretty sick," in my neighborhood, usually means: dying of AIDS; the "pretty" is a modifier indicating extremely sick, in pain, close to the end.) The man rose rather calmly and said, I should go be with him now; feel free to keep playing, if you don't mind; if you have to go, I've left something on your jacket for you. I couldn't think of anything else from memory, but fortunately the Bach French Suites were on the piano, so I hacked my way through several of the slower minuets. Then I thought, well, I guess it's time to go. When I picked up my jacket it had a rather unusual handmade cross on it, fashioned of Mexican coins nailed to wood, with a large rhinestone in the center... I put it down on the chair; I didn't want to be ungracious in not accepting the gift, but I really don't care much for decorative objects, and I tend to be rather allergic to Christian symbolism – so I thought he wouldn't mind too much if I left it behind.

And walked out and home, thinking: music really matters, sometimes...

Us and Them

[Speech for the third World AIDS Day vigil in Newcastle, UK, on December 1, 2006. The speech for the 2004 vigil is here, and for the 2005 vigil here.]

I’m a member of the Newcastle HIV patient group. One of the things we do fairly often is talk to medical students, most of whom look, to me at least, very young indeed. Before we say anything, though, the students are usually asked to imagine some of the problems that might come up around HIV positive patients. We’re supposed to sit quietly during this part, and sometimes we manage well enough; but usually the students come up with one example after another of all the different ways that we might accidentally infect someone else, the ways that we can cause different kinds of trouble for other people. Now that is all very important of course, and we all care a great deal about it – but sometimes, after they’ve gone on and on like this for half an hour or so, I get a little impatient, and I can’t help feeling, as they’d say in New York: so what am I then, chopped liver?

I know what they’re thinking – at least, what they’re thinking before one of us speaks up, before we start to tell our stories, before they start to register that the patients in the room are real people, with feelings, and pasts, and maybe even futures. For them, at first anyway, we’re already past any kind of hope – their first impulse is to sort of ring-fence us, to make sure that the problems we represent don’t get any bigger. This is a version of what we call That Us-And-Them Thing – you know what I mean: when you know who belongs to your tribe, your family – or your country, your type of person – and, even more importantly, who doesn’t: because it’s not just a matter of who you care about, it’s also about deciding who is simply off your radar, or even who you see as a threat.

It’s a natural thing, and something we all do: you can’t care about everybody in the world, you can’t make everyone’s problems your own. So you draw lines – some of them obvious: you care whether your sister is happy with her new boyfriend, you care whether the friend who’s making you a cup of tea is looking worn out, you might even care whether the guy who works at the corner store seems cheerful today. But you don’t care as much, and maybe you can’t afford to care, whether a woman on the Metro looks upset, or whether somebody’s dying of starvation in another time zone.

Of course, AIDS has its own huge history of Us Versus Them, going all the way back to the beginning – when they first called it GRID, Gay-Related Immune Disorder, the best thing about that name was the reassurance that it wasn’t a problem for anybody who wasn’t a gay man. Then, and for a long time, all those who weren’t gay men were The General Population – and that phrase haunted us for years: the government worried that the virus would get out of the gay ghettos into the General Population, which meant you and your mom and your cousin Fred; if it ever did that we’d be in real trouble. Later it was all about the Three Hs – Haitians, homosexuals, and hemophiliacs – and that was strange. A joke from that time, from the mid-1980s, went something like: What’s the really hard part about getting AIDS? The answer: getting your wife to believe that you’re Haitian.

In this country, of course, one of the smart decisions for guys who were gay was: don’t sleep with Americans. In America, it was more specific: don’t sleep with anybody from New York or San Francisco. Over the years, this all kept changing shape – for straight men, don’t sleep with anybody from Africa; for women, check the guy in the bar to see if he has needle marks in his arm. For governments, there would be decisions on a larger scale – let’s not have any immigrants from, say, South Africa, or Indonesia. As you all probably know, a lot of our friends from Africa were sent back by the British government last year, around election time – because they were somebody else’s problem, because they might cost money, maybe even because they were some kind of a threat.

Here in Newcastle, a young man who had come from Malaysia was told that he was going to be sent back home because his health was too good. The fact that it would be difficult for him to get medications at home, that he would probably get seriously ill if he were deported, wasn’t very interesting to the Home Office, because he was clearly one of Them, not one of Us. So he did something kind of foolish: he stopped taking his medications so that he would get a little sick, so that they would let him stay for a while longer. Sadly, he stopped them for too long, and his immune system went to pieces; some of you here probably went to his funeral.

So: what can we do about Us – and what can we do about Them?

Well, the truth is, we’re already doing a lot. We’ve all probably learned it doesn’t do much good to tell people to just stop thinking in certain ways – never quite works, does it? – but what we have seen is that simply letting people know that there are others around them who are HIV-positive, who sit on buses with them, or work with them, or go to pubs with them, makes all the difference in the world.

Once you’ve told someone that you’re positive – or, if you feel like being a little bit dramatic, you can tell them that you have AIDS – you can just stand there talking to them about anything: the weather, the traffic, what you had for lunch. You don’t have to tell them how to think, how to feel: but you can almost sense this little dial in their head gradually clicking over from ‘Strange, Scary, Infectious Thing’ to ‘This Guy I’m Talking To.’ And those who aren’t positive have the same effect every time they tell a friend, Oh yeah, my friend who has AIDS said the other day….

You might get a raised eyebrow, or a few questions; but as you talk, you can almost see them getting accustomed to a world that’s suddenly become a slightly different shape – a world where one of the members of ‘Us’ now includes somebody who just happens to have AIDS.

A bit wound up

Today is World AIDS Day; after the past few chaotic, often fun but occasionally fairly awful days, I need to get my brain around a BBC interview in the morning, and then I have the afternoon to somehow get my thoughts in order to find something to say at tonight's vigil.

It's a bit like a performance, a bit like teaching a class: you go over and over the same ground, hoping something will leap out at you as Your Hook, or perhaps: Your Punchline. If you find it, you can easily work up to it, getting gasps of amazement when you catch the trapeze at exactly the right moment – but if you don't find it you're fairly sunk. (And if that sounds too journalistic or frivolous for Such A Serious Matter, just remember – I spent the 80s scraping along in San Francisco without a position or career expectations, doing any damned thing anybody asked me in terms of writing and arts administration, in addition to classy things like being the snotty, undertrained receptionist in a large firm – I have a long history of doing pretty much anything for attention, which predates any professional credentials I have now.)

As for the bad things in the past few days: I worry about them a bit – enduring being the butt of a burst of passive-aggressive rage, sleeping on a broken guest bed, a closed bridge and crazed traffic – only because I have a history of bad things happening in the lead-up to my birthday (now eight days away). Perhaps it's because I have Scorpio rising in my chart – okay I don't know much about that either, but it's suggestive that, although the Sagittarius that I'm supposedly identified with should be fiery, powerful, cheerful, male, I also have the coldest and creepiest of astrological signs threaded through my existence. In any case, rotten things happen, and life always looks fairly awful, just before most of my birthdays; then, generally on the day itself, usually in the evening or sometimes starting the morning after, things clear up and get better.

A peculiar and, you will say, unbelievable phenomenon – well no apologies here; it's a bit like the strange factoid that I only get seriously ill every four years. No sensible medical reasoning here, just the fact that my major HIV-related miseries have occurred in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004. I will, of course, observe the beginning of 2008 with narrowed eyes and folded arms.

Anyway: I hope the next week won't get too bad. And I hope I'll find that hook, that perfect thing to say tonight....