Friday
Oct 28, 2005
SGN.org
Volume 33
Issue 43
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Tuesday, Dec 02, 2008
05:40
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Not Thinking Straight by Madelyn Arnold |
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| AIDS and Comfort | ||
| Because I've been living through the AIDS years, I get worried when I hear even rumors connecting friends and illness. So when (some time ago) I heard that my old teacher, Joe, had leukemia, I phoned him.
Beforehand, there had been a chill blowing from his direction. I thought it came from my having been a little hellion in high school; or that he simply hated queers, like most people in the land of "backhome" did [and do]. Funny to discover that, far from disliking me as Lesbian, he absolutely hated me as hetero. By reputation, which is also kind of funny. Just as I had heard of his illness, he had heard of mine. I thought that meant he knew that I had AIDS. And because he lives in the town where I was pillaried, I thought he knew that I was Gay - God knows everybody else does. But in fact, a mutual enemy had told his wife that he and I were screwing. Naturally he took this to mean I was a heterosexual bald-faced liar - the concept of Bisexual having by-passed him.I set him um, straight, as they say... And for more than an hour we talked about mutual friends. LOST IN SPACE He's a fine musician, and musicians in that area tend to know one another, rubbing shoulders in the musicals, cantatas, symphonies, and so forth within a 200 mile radius of their 'Kentuckiana' towns. Gay connections in the arts are well known everywhere, and in small town America there's an especially large overlap between Gay and musical. Yet it it had never occurred to Joe that he knew queer folk (well, knew very many), and name after name came up where I knew an individual had [or had had] AIDS. He usually had not known. Joe was mournful and confused. Names of his old students, old patrons, old pals. Those who had been one in music with him. He named boys I had grown up with and known or suspected were Gay, a few I had never dreamed were Gay, and some Bisexual men who confused him most of all. One good friend of his, warm and clever and accomplished, had killed himself when he had discovered he was HIV+. Joe was aghast. "Couldn't he have told me?" They had been close for years. And the friend had never mentioned this rather central aspect of his life. The dead man was married and had children. Perhaps he was truly Bisexual. Or perhaps he was continuing what he been doing all his life - the same thing most Gay people (especially women) do there - hiding. If he truly was Bisexual, perhaps he could not face the likelihood he had infected his wife. But most likely he gave up because he knew that any man testing positive would be absolutely identified as Gay - forget this nonsense about transplants or transfusions (you know: innocent transmission) . He had built up a little theater company and chamber groups and chorales... he worked with children as well as adults. It would all be ripped away from him. And as for being ill with that disease in that place.... OR JUST LOST There were so many horror stories that had leaked back to me about other PWAs and how they were treated, stories heard all the way out in Seattle, yet presumably not in the same town, by Joe. How could he not have heard. One story goes: my friend Tom (also a friend of Joe's) returned to the old hometown to die, and his kin took care of him, but when he developed a pneumonia beyond their ability to nurse, he was taken to the local hospital. There he was adequately treated by personnel dressed for biological warfare, and placed in isolation without a call bell. He had no way of calling for help, but on the other hand was scolded for fouling his bed. He was very weak; if he had wanted to walk to the nurses' station, he would have had to start out several weeks beforehand. Once a shift, somebody would come by. He began shouting when he needed something and staff shut the door to his room; so he called his family, who came out to the hospital and raised hell. This was before local cell phone towers.... The next time he was admitted, there was no phone. It had been ordered of course, it had just never got around to hooking itself up. Then there was my old friend and accompanist who succeeded in New York, where so many fail; he made to the Met and then developed AIDS-related cancer. He died in the late '80s, by himself in a small room on his parents' property. The most important thing to his family has been to accent that he died of cancer and (therefore) not HIV. And that was true for our energetic friend Ron and his family. He was doing well on the small stage (I don't know how he was supporting himself); he was cut down just as he was beginning to get a bit of local prominence in Chicago. He was a close friend of my old teacher. How could the sensitive Joe really not have known? It wasn't until he began to hear of those he knew acquiring AIDS that he paid any attention to it, and I would guess that the same is true for his own leukemia. An artist is an artist is an artist - generally oblivious to everything but art. He had never known his friends were Gay, and their deaths from HIV completely threw him. AIDS AND COMFORT Out here, we've all heard of AIDS memorials, rallies for support, organizations for the support and sustenance of PWAs, special clinics catering to PWAs, benevolent organizations like Shanti and Chicken Soup Brigade (now together as "Lifelong AIDS Alliance"), and especially, the quilt project. This latter, with its hundreds of names and designs, must contains at least some names of some of the boys and men - and women - I've known. But how many are not? How many families fight like tigers to deny their kin had AIDS [if only to keep sexual identity a secret]? How many lie [very] quietly now, their disease a shame, their sexuality a tightly kept secret. Erased by HIV; forgotten as Gay. As for any women with the condition, few will believe it can happen, and no one will discuss it. But at least the disease doesn't mark us out as queer. Junkies or working girls, perhaps; not queer.I can't think how many events and observations I've attended around the subject of AIDS, or how many memorials we've held here in this city alone - the keyword being 'city'. My hometown is just a town in a little midwest state. The cities don't reach out much to the small towns, where 'our people' are still living much the same way as they were in the early '60s... or 50's. I'll tell you where we need the next Memorial: Smalltown, Anystate. We need to read out the names of people snapped up by this plague - how many have had this stigmatiized condition, including those who contracted the disease through blood transfusions, needle use and heterosexual relations. And we need to make clear after all this time that Gay people are there among them - always have been, always will be. That AIDS is merely a virus and the condition a misfortune; that in MiddleAmerica homosexuals are indigenous. Middle America is where we need the next few dozen Memorials. I might even go back home to help. Heh. |
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