Meanwhile, everything has changed. Being gay — which Americans call a life-choice, and which we might perhaps call a destiny — is a different proposition now. But so is the other route, as aids becomes a part of the heterosexual experience. The liberation of coitus, the rutting revolution, has probably entered its last phase. When the danger is ultimate, then every risk is ultimate also. It is over.
Despite new genetic technologies, any cure or prevention is probably some way ahead. ‘We have anti-virals which seem to inhibit the retrovirus which seems to have a linchpin role,’ I was informed at the aids Medical Foundation in New York. ‘Prospects are uncertain bordering on grim.’ The vaccine for hepatitis B took seventeen years.
But some hope can be rescued from the mess, the human disaster of aids. The disease will probably obey Darwinian rules and seek an evolutionarily stable strategy, becoming less virulent, non-fatal. The cure, when and if it comes, will revolutionise medicine. Sexual relations of all kinds will soften, and the emphasis will shift from performance, from sexual muscle. Gay leaders prudently stress the need for trust, for confidentiality in the liaison between the various communities. In the short term, of course, they are absolutely right. But a better situation would clearly be one in which no confidentiality is necessary.
aids victims are in the forefront, at the very pinnacle of human suffering. Broadly speaking, they can do you no harm unless you elect to go to bed with them. We are in this together now. An opportunity presents itself. There is no good reason — only a lot of bad ones — why we shouldn’t take it.
Observer 1985
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Postscript This piece was written under unusual pressures. Early 1985 was the time when the British tabloids locked on to aids. Twice a week the headlines yelped of gay plagues and black deaths, blighted babies, panicking health workers, proposed quarantine, homosexual apartheid. I very much wanted not to add to the grief and vulnerability of the gay population, and I was greatly relieved when the piece went down well in that quarter, and also with the medical community.
Here is a minor, and personal, illustration of the ease with which one can get ‘politicised’ by such sensitive matters. A week after the aids piece appeared I was proudly reading a short story of mine, newly published though written months earlier. To my horror (and the shock was physical, dizzying, armpit-igniting) I saw that I — or my Jewish-American narrator — had used the word ‘faggots’! The locution was right for the narrator and right for the story; but I shouldn’t have used it. Not now, I thought. Already, after a few months, I have relapsed somewhat and would probably defend the original phrase (the story, after all, was set in 1980: pre-AIDS); but I won’t forget the seizure of remorse when my eye fell on faggots, ì also began to understand the American tendency to euphemise with jargon, and its-misplaced homage to the power of the word.
Looking into aids taught me other things too. I had never read any medical literature before; and I am here to tell you, if you don’t already know, that with or without aids there is a dictionary ten feet wide full of stuff that is just raring to screw you up. Secondly, I discovered I knew nothing whatever about homosexuality. Having learned a bit, I now find the condition, the fate, the destiny much more interesting, much more sympathetic — and much, much stranger. I had never registered the otherness. Nor, it seemed, had anyone else. The article caused a certain amount of unease and hesitation at the Observer, which, with the Guardian, is the most liberal and humanistic newspaper in Britain. Those traditions quickly prevailed and the piece appeared as planned, though with one or two changes and in an atmosphere of worry. I was obliged to amend ‘fucking queer’ to ‘filthy queer’ in the first paragraph; and I had to bowdlerise the description of how the rectum deals with bodily fluids. The first change was routine but the second change puzzled me at the time. Agreed, the rectum’s job is not a particularly glamorous one; yet someone has to do it. Why this resistance to corporeal truth? Even in a near-impeccably enlightened institution like the Observer I glimpsed a measure of the intransigence, the reluctance to know, felt by society at large.