In New York, everyone on the public wing refers to aids patients as PWAs: persons with aids. ‘Why?’ I asked a young administrator at the aids Medical Foundation. ‘It’s to avoid any suggestion of victim, sufferer, and so on.’ ‘Why?’ I asked again. They are victims; they are sufferers. But the answer is of course ‘political’, New York being the most politicised city on earth. New York, where even supermarkets and greasy-spoons have their ‘policies’; where all action seems to result from pressure, and never from a sane initiative.
Other euphemisms in this sphere include ‘sexual preference’ (‘orientation* being considered ‘judgmental’), ‘sexually active’ (some go further and talk of ‘distributive’ as opposed to ‘focal’ sex) and ‘intravenous substance-abuser’ (as if a junkie is going to feel much cheered or ennobled by this description). Over here, handicapped people are merely ‘challenged’, and the ‘exceptional’ child is the child with brain damage. It is a very American dishonesty — antiseptic spray from the verbal-sanitation department. Having named a painful reality (the belief seems to be), you also dispatch it; you get it off your desk.
In 1983 the total federal budget for the aids crisis was $2,8 million; in 1984 it was $61 million. But this was all grant-hound money, Nobel-race money: not a cent had been allocated to the treatment of patients. During the time of my stay in New York (this was late March 1985), the old tightrope-artist Mayor Koch came across with a $6.5 million package. He was responding to countless protests and petitions; more important (according to many observers), he was responding to the fact that 1985 is election year. The truth is that the New York record on aids compares woefully with that of San Francisco, which has long been a coordinated network of treatment and educational services, everything from bereavement-counselling to meals-on-wheels. San Francisco has also taken the controversial step of closing the gay bathhouses, by order of the health authorities. The Village Voice claimed that Koch has always been terrified of any association, pro or anti, with the gay cause. Remember the slogan: ‘Vote for Cuomo, Not the Homo’? Koch quickly denounced this ‘slander’ as ‘vile’ and ‘outrageous’ — also ‘irrelevant’. His confusions are plain enough; but so are those of the gay population, which remains as brittle and fragmented as any other stratum in this volatile city, the city of the omni-partisan.
In New York you will find every permutation of human response to the aids crisis. The bathhouses are still open here, and commercialised gay sex is still big business. Many gays see any move to limit their activity as an attack on the civil-rights front, an attempt to isolate, to ‘pathologise’. More extreme are the ‘disco dummies’ who, even after contracting aids themselves, maintain or actually increase their sexual output. You hear talk of ‘medical scenarios’ in the bathhouses; you hear talk of sado-masochistic routines featuring aids as the ultimate ‘sex death’; you hear talk of just about everything. The heterosexual community has reacted more predictably: the National Gay Task Force estimates incidents of violent harassment at about a thousand a month.
Throughout the history of sexual disease, injunctions to enforce celibacy or monogamy have never had the slightest effect. Then again, the stakes have never been so high. It is quite clear from statistics on routine complaints like gonorrhoea (down 50 per cent in some studies) that sexual activity has drastically decreased. Plainly a lot of thought, and lively improvisation, has already gone into this matter. Strategies include libido-suppressors and vitamin combinations, stress-reduction seminars, ‘jerk-off circles and closed groups of ‘clear’ gays. There are even Orgiasts Anonymous services, where a sponsor ‘talks you down’ from an urge to visit the bathhouse. Such expedients may seem bizarre to the straight world. But that is because the straight world expects the gay man to follow its own sexual master-mould. And he doesn’t. Homosexuality isn’t a version of heterosexuality. It is something else again.
*
The consoling idea or the quietly monogamous gay couple is an indolent and sentimental myth. With a large number of exceptions, and all sorts of varieties of degree, it just isn’t like that. Friendship, companionship, fellowship — these are paramount; but pairing-and-bonding on the wedlock model is our own dated fiction. Gay lovers seldom maintain any sexual interest in each other for more than a year or two. The relationship may remain ‘focal’, may well be lifelong, yet the sex soon reverts to the ‘distributive’.