1987. A hospital room. David Wojnarawicz takes loving photos of his friend, angelic on the pillow. Dead. His name Peter. Eyes open angel-dreaming, the divot between neck and collarbone a foxhole.
Peter Hujar died of AIDS in a hospital bed in 1987.
He got AIDS because the Reagan administration didn’t acknowledge its existence.
He got AIDS because researchers didn’t want to associate themselves with a “gay disease”.
He got AIDS because gay sex is a rebellious act, confined to the limits, covert, casual, criminal.
He got AIDS because he didn’t wear a condom (or he did but the other guy didn’t (or the other guy said he did but lied (or the other guy really did but it broke (or they didn’t give a shit about whether they got “it” by that point)))).
He got AIDS because that’s what gay men did back then, they got AIDS and lived/died dirty and diseased.
Or,
Peter got AIDS because he liked men. He liked men so much he went to bed with them, held them, spoke to them soothingly, caressing their face as they lay legs-entwined. He got AIDS because he couldn’t stop caring about and loving men, and wanting to be held and to hold, to feel that twin-heartbeat of two-into-one autonomic nervous systems synchronised. He got AIDS because he loved.
The myth of AIDS has found its rhythm today through the continuation of those most harmed by it. I no longer hold confused notions for Grindr, the app where we market ourselves and purchase sex-as-symbol, where gays of all roots become acquainted in the diminishment of themselves into icons of femme-masc-bear-jock-twink-geek-otter-etc.
This diminishment so learned, so profound, that we don’t question why it is only us who have a “Grindr”, why it is only us who are so willing, so numerous, to support the distancing of sex from love, attachment, or compassion (inward or outward). Everyone has casual sex, I am not a fool, but it is no far-reach to say that us gays have perfected it. Diluted it into a raw package we barely dare to hold.
We splash in the shame of the AIDS crisis like ducks in a polluted stream. It’s all we’ve known, and yet we don’t realise this shame is just as deadly as pneumonia, that we cannot say to have strength until we sluice this imported disgust from our bloodstreams. I have heard us told for millennia that we are abhorrent, worthy only to be outcasts or dead by suicide or murder. I see us carrying the yoke of our past, insisting ourselves into inherited shame.
It is hard to look inwards to see if my argument rings true, brain-folds are labyrinths, desires whirlpools. Let’s lift ourselves from the maze, look at it with a bird’s-eye by examining the stories we have dressed our identity in.
Let us question why we champion “gay” content, usually written by non-gay men, such as Love Simon, Heartstoppers, or Luca. These media, quality or not, crystallise our experience as cutesy and juvenile, commodifying our stories and limiting them to adolescent ‘hanging-out’.
Or what of the alternative? Where our sexuality is instability: Brokeback Mountain, Skam, It’s a Sin, Call Me By Your Name, Moonlight, Boy Erased, Paris is Burning, Holding the Man, All of Us Strangers, Of an Age. Media that ties our sexuality to shame, to shadows.
We are grieving. And I see our affection for juvenile gayness as a respite from our immediate past. But within the experience of grief is acceptance. Within our grief is a story of two men who are gay, not for comedy, not for drama, not for some dramalogical intent. But for the same reason some characters are straight, which is to say, for no reason at all.
Avengers: Endgame is our north-star. Although, terribly, it did not give us Ant-Man going up Thanos’ stinky, it did offer us two things. The first was one of the biggest crossover events in history. The second was a man discussing losing his husband in the blip. And then it moved on. It’s small, it is, but isn’t that what we want? There was no fanfare, no ‘reason’ for him to be gay. He could have been a woman grieving her husband, or vice versa. He was just there.
Of course, previous historical expressions of our sexuality have always needed to be counter-cultural, and thus we have needed to place our love in contrast to criticism. What we are suffering from now is the inability to detach from that framework. Our expressions are still being outlined by external hates. But for some of us, our lives are not meaningfully tarred by discrimination any more.
I have prayed against myself, whispered to a God I didn’t believe in. I have revulsed at the idea of a man on my manhood. I have been to the homes of my fellow sufferers and pretended the sex I was having was somehow worthwhile, somehow anything. I’ve rolled on, respect slipping off me like moss.
I show these notches in my belt to tell you it felt necessary. To exist as a gay man, even at your most privileged, is to exist as the next link in an inheritance of hate. The AIDS crisis “ended” only thirty years ago, as an epidemic it still remains. To look to our fathers is to look at those who wear the scars of IV-drips and terror.
But we cannot wait for those who are not us to tell us what to do. That will not happen. Our society is at its most profitable when we are at our most wretched. Apps like Grindr require us to devalue ourselves. It does not serve us, we serve it. It offers us the addictive method of the slot-machine and we pull that handle, over and over again. It cannot and will not exist if queer men start to view ourselves as valuable, if we look for love as opposed to pain. Liberation will not come from those that need us deprived.
Putting my body with your body is not disgusting, we are not diseased. If I lie with a man as a man lies with a woman, I am enacting love, not perversion. We need to strike out an unwritten path away from the outdated, imported viewpoint that to love is to die, to fuck is to sin. This is done only by us. We are the children of traumatised parents who cannot bear to see us leave the nest, who hold us back with compassion.
If we carry the torch used against our ancestors, we justify our own cage. By engaging in an artistic history that galvanises sadness, we give validity to that which makes us sad. To my eyes, the most revolutionary portrayal of gayness will not be one of explicit sex scenes or love in the shadow of death. It is two men, together. No linkage of depression to their togetherness, no shame to wrestle like a lion. Just two men, together.
These men can still fuck, they can still be sad. But they also exist if you took those things away. Their existence is self-speaking, not given by grief.
I am here now, in this end-of-page blank. Above me is my blood ink-coloured. Do you accept this transfusion? I cut out my hunger and place it like fire in your belly, twisting, rebelling.
Will you feed it?
