Body Double.
YEARS ago, when AIDS first surfaced, William F. Buckley Jr. proposed in a column that HIV-positive men have that fact tattooed on their buttocks. The buttocks were a nice touch. It implied that ordinary folk in public would not see it, only the sex partner for whom the HIV-positive person disrobed. There was something seemingly both considerate and malicious about the suggested location; this warning that could be seen only by the person who was in danger--the sodomite--at the moment when he was threatened. At the time, of course, the proposal was compared to the tattoo Jews had on their wrists in the camps, and was denounced with the same outrage that met Pat Buchanan's simultaneous demand that all teachers and restaurant workers with HIV be immediately fired.Some years later, Scott O'Hara, the late, subversive porn star and author--not to mention The Biggest Dick in San Francisco--decided, after growing tired of telling sex partners he was HIV-positive, to have the fact tattooed, not on his buttocks, but his biceps--where indeed everyone could see it. The tattoo was the culmination of his disillusion with being honest, the same chagrin two friends of mine reached about that time, who found they were most likely to be rejected when they told the truth. Then and now, gay men operate under a peculiar code of conduct: They'll have sex with a stranger whose HIV status they don't know, but not with someone they learn is positive, even though it's the same person. Go figure. The body, in other words, is now double.
This duplicity has produced the real "Don't ask, don't tell" policy of the past fifteen years--not the one in the military, but the code of silence when tricking. What has this made this possible is the strategy of safe sex. Believing that it's what you do, not whom you do it with, gay men avoided the viral apartheid that people have been worrying about since the plague started. By practicing safe sex, gay men have been able to retain one body of available sex partners, when, in fact, for two decades we have been living with two gay bodies, the Negative and the Positive.
This is the discomfiting reality that no one has wanted to discuss much for fear of excluding an already burdened group. Proposals like Buckley's only heightened that alarm. But in this country (unlike Cuba) there was no branding or quarantine. In fact, from the very start there has been an understandable desire to hide any signs of HIV. The very first year of the plague even Fire Island beauties started developing pot bellies. The goal then was both to store fat against the coming wasting syndrome and to avoid suspicion that one had HIV at all. It was, furthermore, never expected that HIV-positive people would stop having sex--though Larry Kramer urged everyone, simply, to "Stop flicking!" (A simple solution--but nothing involving sex is simple.) People with HIV were not to be ostracized in any way, and that included the bond that unites gay men--the erotic. To stop having sex would only accentuate the cruel isolation caused by the disease.
At the start, AIDS seemed doubly cruel already because it marked so visibly, so publicly, what is usually a private condition-illness--a particularly malicious revenge (pace Pat Buchanan) on a group that valued beauty so highly. People were literally spotted with KS; they lost so much weight they looked like Somalian refugees. The body decayed in a ghastly way, like the picture of Dorian Gray. Then came the protease cocktail, and the gym culture began producing bodies that belied that reality. The new gay body--in part a reaction to AIDS--looked like Conan the Barbarian's. Then--remorseless HIV!--the side effects of the new drugs redistributed fat deposits in such sites as "the buffalo hump," "the Crixivan stomach," even if these signs were understood only by initiates. Now word comes from the World Congress of Liposuction Surgery (who knew?) that "HIV infected patients are turning to cosmetic surgeons to remove 'buffalo humps' and other fat deposits," which "some consider as stigmatizing as Kaposi's sarcoma lesions were in the early course of the AIDS epidemic."
All this concealment went only so far, however: gay men, deconstructing even the most buffed clones, saw what was otherwise not apparent. And a certain dialogue continued to be unspoken. In the code of silence, the "Don't ask, don't tell" of tricking, few people had the desire, or social skills, or chutzpah to ask a partner his sero-status--or confidence in the answer's truthfulness. A crucial aspect of the gay body remained invisible. A certain moral responsibility, too. The Negative man thought, "No one would knowingly infect someone; he's a nice guy; I don't have to worry"; while the Positive man thought, "If he's here (at the baths / in bed with me / at this sex club), he knows the risk and assumes it, so I don't have to say anything." In short, each person shifted the moral responsibility to the other. This avoidance of discussion was of course a form of denial--the most common of all--and in reality a sort of moral mediocrity. In the end, people on the street concluded that if you didn't have unprotecte d anal sex, everything was okay; and to this date only pesky reports of oral transmission and new strains of the virus that are immune to the cocktail spoil the comfort of this belief. But the fact remains: there are two gay bodies, one with HIV and one without it; and the only way new infections occur are through the contact of one with the other.
In reality the rate of new infections "stabilized" years ago in gay men--though theoretically it should have been zero, from 1983 on--and the recent increase in San Francisco is reportedly happening mostly to the young. (This, health workers speculate, is for a variety of reasons: low self-esteem, emotional vulnerability, a mistaken belief that young people are not infected.) Yet one has to ask, if the young are infecting each other, who infected the young? Who introduced the virus into their age cohort? You don't have to believe in bug-chasers (people who allegedly want to get the virus) or gift-givers (people who allegedly want to give it) to understand that people are still having sex, that each person assesses risk differently, and that not all of them are ethical to the same degree. No one since Scott O'Hara has tattooed his HIV status on his biceps (save a small subversive group of men in Seattle several years ago). Positives are unfortunately so often rewarded for their honesty by rejection that they s top disclosing.
Meanwhile, the gay body appears ever healthier. Last July the swarms of men trekking to the beach in Provincetown looked like a convention of gladiators. Often the face on that body betrayed the usual insecurity, discontent, anxiety, but from the neck down these men were brutally buffed. And why not? What's sad and so ironic is that the cosmetic aspect of the gay body--which gay men themselves have always made fun of--is now more loaded than ever. For example, a friend of mine that I admire for always asking his sex partner's HIV status was mocked by an HIV doctor for assuming people will tell the truth.
That gay men have constructed the body as a disguise, a projection, a tool of attraction is nothing new: we assume, perhaps sadly, that we are chiefly sex objects, that no one's going home with us for our sense of tact. (Or our honesty. Nothing about the gay body is sadder than this.) But the construction has now assumed a moral dimension; and it's not just that the muscle number may be a big queen. No doubt Negatives in their most angry moments wish Positives weren't having sex at all. Perhaps Positives think it's the Negatives' responsibility to assess risk, not theirs; or even, on some subliminal level, that no gay person should be allowed to escape this if they haven't. Who knows? It's the mere possibility of unethical behavior that is chilling. Or consider the panel discussion among porn directors on the Website XtremeSex.com, where you'll find claims that safe sex isn't sex at all, that exchanging fluids is the essence of male communion, that some people want to get infected, and that these things till recently couldn't even be discussed.
It's a credit to gay men that infection rates did go down (till the recent spike in San Francisco). It means that by and large the community has been behaving ethically. But in a truly ethical community there would have been not one new infection once the means of transmission became known. Yet there have been many. Something morally important has still not been achieved: zero transmission. As someone in a Manhattan AIDS program said, the goal must be for the Positive to say, "I will not infect anyone," and the Negative to say, "I will not be infected." That's the only way the two gay bodies can co-exist now, the only way they can be one. But in real life all this is still incredibly murky, scary, and unspoken.
Andrew Holleran's most recent fiction is a book of short stories, In September, the Light Changes.
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| Author: | HOLLERAN, ANDREW |
|---|---|
| Publication: | The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide |
| Date: | Jul 1, 2001 |
| Words: | 1544 |
| Previous Article: | Sports and Lesbian Culture. |
| Next Article: | The Gym Body and Heroic Myth. |