Writings

Now That It’s Over

By Eric Rofes

Is it possible for a community to inhabit a state of crisis for twenty years? This is one of the critical questions which underlies current community debates about gay men’s shifting understandings of HIV disease. While rank-and-file gay men have integrated the day-to-day reality of HIV into our lives and moved forward, some AIDS groups and a cadre of increasingly hysterical gay journalists seem determined to corral gay men back into the bomb shelters.

They rant about old diseases and new diseases, second waves and third waves of AIDS, and arrogantly wrap themselves in the belief that they’re doing a service to a gay community in denial about sexual health risk. If they’re right and gay men in their 20s suffer a volume of HIV-related loss parallel to men in the 1980s, they’ll smugly assume the mantle of visionary sage. If they’re wrong, who will blame them for caring? Who will even remember?

I will. And those who are struggling to create new, effective ways of working with gay men’s sex in a shifting epidemic context, will remember those journalists and AIDS leaders who--absent a concrete plan of their own for promoting gay men’s sexual health--spent their energies attempting to undermine the work of others. For even if one does embrace the ravings of Michelangelo Signorile, our own Jerry Springer, or buy into the “science” of Gabriel Rotello, or find resonant the cult of crisis and morbidity which some AIDS groups are attempting to preserve, what kinds of efforts should be initiated to improve gay men’s sexual health? Absent points to consider at the end of Rotello’s books--suggestions which he has deemphasized (and some would say backed away from) in speeches to several gay groups--what actions do the crisis-mongerers’ arguments suggest?

If the journalists and AIDS leaders seem to have no specific agenda for gay men’s health promotion and HIV prevention, some of their acolytes seem all too eager to take certain radical steps. As I’ve traveled around the country speaking to people about my book Dry Bones Breathe: Gay Men Creating Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures , I have met numerous gay men who seem ready to embark on heightened efforts to crack down on gay men’s sexual cultures. They share passionately three beliefs which I don’t: (1) HIV is raging out of control among gay men; (2) Protease inhibitors will fail most of the gay men who are taking them; (3) Most gay men have declared “AIDS is over” and gone back to business-as-usual 1970s style.

I have seen no empirical data which supports any of these conclusions. While gay men continue to become infected with HIV and some gay men die of AIDS, gay men may be the ony population in the United States who can claim to be successful at gradually reducing the level of HIV seroprevalence among successive age cohorts. Over our successive lifespans, my cohort (men in their 40s) will have suffered a level of HIV-related loss which is higher than men in their 30s will suffer, which is alternately likely to be higher than that which men in their 20s will suffer. While protease inhibitors seem to fail some people with HIV/AIDS, failure has tended to be focused on those who have been treated with many other pharmaceuticals. Newly-infected people with HIV and those who have not been heavily treated, seem to be doing much better on the cocktails. Only a highly-selective reading of the papers presented at the recent Geneva conference allows one to default to the “protease inhibitors have failed” argument.

Perhaps the most dangerous myth put forward by the followers of the crisis-mongerers is their insistance on seeing anyone who steps outside the bomb shelter as “in denial” about HIV. They see two options for gay men: crisis or cure. They falsely claim those of us who say gay men’s experience of HIV disease has changed, believe the epidemic is over. Yet while they continue their sad, tired battle cry, most of us are in the process of carving out some middle ground between the two. We no longer experience HIV disease as meaning an invitable death, and we no longer authentically inhabit the state of crisis which our community entered in the mid-1980s. This does not mean we don’t care whether we become infected. It does not mean we believe HIV disease is a picnic or that AIDS isn’t becoming a crisis to other communities about which we care. It does not mean that we don’t give money, use a condom, volunteer our time, or care about people with HIV. It simply means we have accepted the reality of HIV in the world we inhabit, have taken steps to minimize risk, and won’t feign shock, surprise, and terror to fit into their tired world-view.

Recently an AIDS group in my area closed its doors, claiming it had lost the ability to attract volunteers because people mistakenly believed protease inhibitors were a cure and AIDS was over. Increasingly AIDS groups are defaulting to this explanation when they can’t attract volunteers, raise money, or draw participants to their workshops. It’s so much easier to make this claim than acknowledge their inability to effectively craft outreach efforts or their lack of skill at fundraising or designing meaningful programs. Instead of getting off their high horses, rolling up their sleeves, and addressing the challenge of activism and organizational development in a shifting epidemic climate, they misrepresent their target populations and leave the fields without learning an important lesson: community organizing requires you to meet people where they’re at, not where they were ten years ago or where you’d like them to be.

AIDS as gay men understood it in the 1980s is over. HIV infection no longer guarantees a swift and ugly death, the volume of death experienced in gay male communities has decreased dramatically, and our sexual cultures have been reborn. This means everything has to change: our service organizations, prevention programs, activism, and rituals like the Quilt. It’s time for everyone involved in the effort against HIV disease to recognize this shift in gay communities and see it for what it is: a life-affirming response to cataclysmic loss.

Spending 20 years in a state of emergency takes a tremendous toll on the human spirit and results in the shattering and fragmentation of community bonds. Successful public health campaigns are not built on rhetorical crisis, sexual guilt, and social stigma. They focus on education, empowerment, and community building rather than sensationalistic sound bites, moralistic crackdowns, and public approbation. Attempting to terrorize gay men, and make us into quaking zombies alienated from our dicks and our desires, doesn’t save lives, it takes lives. Only by acknowledging gay men’s changing experience of HIV diesease and building community beyond crisis, can our health promotion efforts continue to succeed.

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